Skip to content

From the archives

Father Complex

A First Nations celebrity dissects his complicated paternal heritage

Pax Atlantica

NATO’s long-lasting relevance

Family Pride

Profiles in gay life

Writers after Dark

Madhur Anand’s debut novel

Alex Trnka

To Place a Rabbit

Madhur Anand

Knopf Canada

240 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook

The mingling of arts and sciences is familiar territory for Madhur Anand. In her memoir, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, which won the Governor General’s Literary Award for non-fiction in 2020, the poet and professor drew on her knowledge of environmental science to anchor her memories of growing up in Canada as a daughter of Indian immigrants. “When scientists discovered the adaptive significance of ear tufts in owls,” she wrote, “I cut my first bangs and entered grade five.” Published in 2022, her most recent collection of poems, Parasitic Oscillations, juxtaposed ecological and emotional upheavals. In keeping with her exploration of creativity, analysis, and the space between, her debut novel follows an unnamed scientist in her mid-fifties who, while on a press junket for her popular science book, gets a chance to realize her private desire to work with fiction.

Much of To Place a Rabbit unfolds at literary festivals, as touring authors engage in lively after-hours discussions of the creative process, the meaning of autofiction, and the art of translation — the latter being of particular interest to the narrator, who believes that “one can undergo personal transformation when learning another language, that one can become someone else.” (The title references this line of thinking; it is an out-of-context, literal translation of poser un lapin — an idiom for standing someone up.) In a hotel room turned “hospitality suite” at one of these events, the protagonist connects with a writer promoting a novella that was written in English but published only in French. She surprises herself by proposing that she translate the text back into its original language. “The words kept coming out,” she thinks, “I did not even know if I meant them.” After a few more run‑ins with the other author, their collaboration begins.

Illustration by Sandi Falconer for Alex Trnka’s June 2025 review.

An ouroboros of sorts, about writing, translation, and second chances.

Sandi Falconer

Although the novelist insists that it is “not quite autofiction,” her novella, La traduction (The translation), does reflect her experience as a woman travelling to France to write. As the protagonist begins to recast it, she finds herself skipping entire sections. “There was something unscientific, and even unethical, about this,” she admits. Working on the text leads her to reminisce about (and ultimately get in touch with) an ex-lover, a French biologist whom she met decades ago in the Netherlands. Her focus begins to shift from the adaptation to a project of her own: a novel about their affair that she had previously abandoned. “If being with her was not the life I had lived, it could be the one I wrote about,” she decides, “in fiction.” Alongside the narrative present, the reader glimpses scenes from this past relationship and passages from the translation in progress.

The structure of the book is confusing by design; it is a densely layered ouroboros of sorts, abundant with metanarratives and structural loops that become increasingly difficult to follow. Halfway through, the protagonist travels to the Alps alongside her novelist collaborator, mirroring the plot of the novella she is translating. Key stories and details double, perspectives merge before again splitting apart, and the absence of names creates an illusion of multiple, overlapping worlds. Surrendering to complexity and confusion is key to enjoying the text.

Formal flourishes are characteristic of Anand’s style. Her 2020 memoir is bifurcated; the second half is flipped upside down, beginning on the last page and ending at the centre. Here she bookends her novel with an “Abstract” and “Concluding Remarks,” invoking the structure of an academic paper. Before the story even begins, she offers a bone-dry synopsis of the action and reveals to the reader the main character’s central preoccupation: “the power of translation to mitigate desire, and of fiction to transform the course of reality.” In doing so, Anand positions the text as an experiment akin to scientific modelling.

Her narrator, too, considers how wandering in imaginary worlds and alternative realities might be a salve for the nostalgia and regrets of middle age. “I was using memory the way scientists use pollen to reconstruct landscapes,” she admits, “to help better understand past relationships in order to predict the future and make good decisions in this transitory present.” While in Europe, she retraces the steps of her past romance and reckons with the limits imposed by the passage of time. Her own novel and the memories that fuel it begin to consume her. Despite her requests, her French lover is not interested in working together. “She did not want to speak about our past,” she confesses. “She preferred it if my gaps in memory remained part of my work, my own responsibility.” The narrative only gestures to the extent of loss and regret the scientist feels about some of her life-altering decisions. Albeit indirectly, she grapples with her choice to leave behind a queer life for a more traditional marriage (her husband and children remain almost entirely out of view).

“I’ve lived in you all these months — coming out, what are you really like? Do you exist? Have I made you up?” Virginia Woolf wrote to Vita Sackville-West upon finishing Orlando, her novel inspired by their intimate relationship. Anand’s protagonist reads the letters between the two literary greats and wonders how each of them had “managed to stay in their marriages with that kind of love for one another.” Rendered in immersive prose that is as slippery as memory itself, To Place a Rabbit is a compelling portrait of a person who, undone by desire and inspiration, obsessively analyzes — and tampers with — the evidence of her past.

Alex Trnka is an editor living in Toronto.

Advertisement

Advertisement