Inventive Evasion

“Strive to imagine,” a little old lady tells one of the characters in The Breakwater House. Pascale Quiviger is fond of recommendations like this, ones that read like instructions to the reader as much as to the characters. It is good advice for writers, too.

Quiviger’s first novel, The Perfect Circle, won the 2004 French-language Governor General’s Literary Award and, in translation, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize. That novel illustrates the breaking up of a personality that can occur when a love affair goes badly. The Breakwater House, translated by Lazer Lederhendler, is about another kind of loss and grief. The title holds clues about the subject. A breakwater is a barrier that shields the coast from the full force of the sea, and the novel seeks to protect its mourner while exposing and exploring the loss. The word also evokes childbirth. A mother’s water breaking signals the onset of the delivery of her child, and this narrative takes us to a fated birth.

In both these books, Quiviger has taken as her task not just the depiction of heartbreak, but simultaneously the road to recovery, and she has found similar solutions. She fractures her narratives as her characters’ lives have been fractured. By making a collage of fragmented experience, she asks readers to use their imaginations, to create their own meaning. Sometimes this can cause confusion about such mundane elements of storytelling as place and time, but neither matter much in these tales; this is emotional territory. The heart makes its own places and during grief it dwells outside ordinary time.

The Breakwater House begins, as does The Perfect Circle, inside the mysterious and highly subjective point of view of a central character. Poetic techniques—repetition, for example, and at times an incantatory rhythm—lure the reader into a surreal atmosphere. An unnamed young woman discovers a house by the seaside that may or may not exist.

An old woman appears at the gate that opens to the garden that leads to the house. Classic motifs of fairy tales add to the sense of enchantment. It rains and the old woman does not get wet. The young woman hacks down a hedge of thorns and they grow back. We learn a few clues about her predicament. She begins to write.

The novel moves back and forth between the first-person narration with which it begins and the narrative the young woman writes. In her notebooks she chronicles the childhood of two friends, Lucie and Claire. She also recounts Lucie’s mother’s fantastical stories about their past. The Breakwater House attempts to translate experience into symbolic fiction, and this is appropriate for the subject; faced with events too painful to describe, we grope for other methods of representation. “This is a true story because I have invented it,” Lucie’s mother tells her daughter, quoting the French writer Boris Vian, and those readers who appreciate the kind of truth stories can impart will be willing to be convinced.

As the notebooks tell of Lucie and Claire growing up, bits of other lives drift into and out of the narrative, women’s stories that feel real. The Perfect Circle, too, has parts that read like lived experience. In that novel, those sections are paired with the narrator’s self-explorations. In The Breakwater House, they are inserted into the many inventions of the text, where they are almost shocking when they crop up. The girls learn about mothering; they hear an account of an abortion and witness a mother’s pain at the birth of a damaged child. Sadness is a recurrent theme; both girls’ mothers are said to have to hide their unhappiness from their children. But sadness wears an aura of glamour in this novel. Here is an exchange between the adult Lucie and Claire; they are discussing naming Lucie’s baby. One says, “Ophelia is the name of a premature death. It’s pretty, but so very sad.” The other replies, “True, it is sad. But so very pretty.”

Some of the best parts of the novel are the descriptions of this baby who sits at its emotional centre. “Porcelain pink. Her skin resembles the minuscule cups in which childhood dolls would come to drink tea.” An adored child, even her burps are “graceful.”

Both The Perfect Circle and The Breakwater House end with a narrator who believes she has survived a great test. Quiviger provides calmness at the end of both stories, a cleared space, an opening toward our own future. She seems to want to say we, too, can survive.

The Breakwater House is ambitious in the way it includes stories and daydreams in the lives of its characters, but this kind of fiction, which explores intense internal events, relies in part on the subjectivity of the main character, on readers being able to imagine through her. In this book the notebooks are written by one woman, but they assume an omniscience that scatters the attention. The main character can get lost. When that happens, the many indirections and misdirections of the text can start to read as obfuscation. The narrator speaks of “the irresistible charm of something we will someday understand,” and most of us know that charm. Good readers like to feel on the edge of their seats, waiting for the excitement of feeling what it might be like to grasp something they cannot quite get. There are writers who can put us in that place. They do it by writing as if their thoughts are leaping. We have to sit forward to read them before they jump off the page. Quiviger is aiming for this kind of prose, and she writes with some unusual insights and with the occasional leavening of irony and humour. But often gnomic utterances such as “You will lose only what you can’t let go of” and “the imagination holds in reserve a multitude of emergency exits” and opacities such as the description of light that comes “from the present tense, the first time we learn to conjugate, the first time whose secret we forget” coagulate on the page—and sound like things we have heard before. The Breakwater House is a novel in translation, but this is a matter of attitude as much as language. As for the language, it is much more striking when it is specific, evoking the feeling of “creamy wind on new skin,” for example, or making observations like this: that the addition of ribbons, buttons or appliqués could “boost the morale” of a pair of beige slacks.

At one point Lucie’s storytelling mother “contrives a tale designed to deepen the mystery” of a character. The Breakwater House often reads like a tale designed to deepen the mystery of its characters and events, as if they—like those beige slacks—would not be interesting enough without the addition of some decoration. There is so much appliqué in this novel. The question is this: Do all these pieces lead to understanding? We like puzzles. They intrigue us; they may even lead us to hope they have something to teach us. Here, the fantasies and the aphorisms and the fairy tale motifs (gates, keys, twins, messages in bottles, etc.) are an invitation to play, but grief is not a game, and invention cannot do the work of imagination.