Losing the mind is one of those novels where you enter, uncertain at first, but whose force of the story, the characters larger than life and the fanciful romantic universe quickly catch us in their nets.
Camped in Montreal, in the bourgeois Golden Mile of the late 19th centurye century, this novel by Montreal writer Heather O’Neill, translated by Dominique Fortier, is the story of a passionate friendship. Of a grandiose rivalry that will upset the order of things, in a story that speaks of struggles for power and desire, where burning heart and icy reason embrace in a merciless struggle. O’Neill gives life to two characters at the antipodes, who fiercely attract each other like contrary magnetic poles, causing stupor and tremors as they pass.
First there is the solar Marie Antoine, blonde with blue eyes who bathes in opulence, spoiled by a very wealthy widower father who owns a sugar refinery and tries to feed her inner emptiness with purchases as sumptuous as unnecessary. Insensitive to the world outside her kingdom, the young girl lives in her imagination woven with fantasy, roses and sweets where she is queen and object of all desires. Then there is the dark and nihilistic Sadie, brunette with brown eyes, black sheep of the upstart Arnett family who is ready to do anything to reach the upper social class of the Golden Mile.
Their meeting as children will lead to a disastrous event that will turn their lives upside down, when Sadie must go into exile in England and then, on her return, flee to the poor neighborhoods of the city – the sordid Mile -, where she will dive with delights in perversity to feed his pornographic art. Marie, then heir to the family empire, must choose between letting herself be swallowed up or swallowing up the others, between humanism and despotism.
Abundant, sometimes dizzying, the story of Losing the mind unfolds over several years. It sometimes lingers on Marie, sometimes on Sadie, with the introduction of other characters inextricably linked to their destinies, including the pastry chef Mary, with a disturbing resemblance to Marie, and Georges, an orphan with short hair and dressed as a boy with a raised in a brothel, who wants to free women from their bondage.
By refusing to conform to what society and the patriarchy demand of them, Marie and Sadie, intoxicated with themselves, are at once grandiose, but also terrible, sublime and grotesque, as a workers’ revolution rumbles in the city where they will have their role to play, whatever the cost. By deploying this large contrasting and resolutely feminist fresco, the novelist addresses several questions, including those of social and gender inequalities, of the destiny that is drawn for us and of the one we choose, even if we have to lose our heads.
Losing the mind
Heather O’Neill
Alto
344 pages