Is it a collection of short stories or a novel that has fun reinventing, chapter after chapter, a love that does not want to die between its two protagonists, Myriam and Allison?
What awaits us by Myriam Lacroix – born in Montreal and now living in Vancouver, and translated by Catherine Lemay – is an unusual work, but above all a work of great narrative and literary richness. And one can only be amazed by the exuberant, bizarre, crazy, sometimes horrifying turns that the intertwined lives of these two lovers take under the phantasmagorical pen of this author to be discovered.
Underlying this question: what form will an intense, even toxic, love take between two people if we change the parameters — circumstances, professions, social status, even species! Like a fractal figure, the patterns repeat themselves endlessly, shatter, transmute. Punks, they will become mothers after finding a baby in an alley; in “Love and Darkness,” Allison disappears while Myriam, searching for meaning in her life, will meet the latter’s disturbing double, Claire… unless it’s all just a figment of her imagination?
But the most striking is undoubtedly the one that gives its illustration to the book, “Chou d’amour”, a brilliant (and thrilling) story where cannibalism becomes a remedy for depression, brilliantly taken up in mise en abyme in the last story, “L’attribut”.
What awaits us
Quebec America
314 pages