The silence of women seems to be the same everywhere, regardless of their age, the language they speak or the country they live in.
The narrator, a teenager of Romanian origin living in the suburbs of Montreal, observes how the women in her family have unwittingly passed on an impenetrable code of silence. “We are women riddled with holes,” she writes.
There is this paternal grandmother who still lives in the south of Romania and who asks her son if he hits his wife, while remembering how her husband beat her before concluding that “that’s life”. There is this silence that settles between the father and the daughter, who finally decides to keep quiet when it is necessary to speak.
Between the memories and the meal scenes, similar to still life paintings that seek to preserve what remains of the old country, between the French and Romanian that mix with the text, there are these insistent messages from a young man who harasses the narrator. The unease grows with the pages, like a vice made of words — lying, manipulative.
What a strange feeling of suffocation this 24-year-old author manages to provoke in this first novel, as striking as it is lapidary, which can be read in one go. A text that shows that despite #metoo, the awakening of consciences and legal advances, women still face a system that continues to weigh their words when they finally dare to speak.
Silent Women
Heliotrope
136 pages