It is not enough for fragmented writing to be striking — it often is — it must also, like poetry, reveal everything with little, take advantage of silences, reveal memories as well as the present of inner distress. With her first novel, the Montreal writer of Romanian origin Cristina Vanciu succeeds in all this by telling the daily life of a 15-year-old girl who lives in a quiet suburb of Montreal with her family who fled the Ceaușescu regime. Through the incessant text messages of a young man, the meaningless questions, the deafness of the world, she tells of the manipulation and self-deconstruction inherent in aggression. Between these fragments of life, the writer describes — a static and recurring tableau — the food on the table, an incessant reminder of what, from life before, interferes in perceptions and reactions. And there is this narrator, who never poses as a subject, a victim condemned to evolve outside of herself, and who deliberately omits her answers and her explanations, because what is the point of speech when everyone chooses what they hear.
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