Mauve Desert
First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature, Mauve Desert is a must-read for readers and writers alike.\ This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first, Mauve Desert, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In...
Search in google:
Fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor, chasing fear and desire and the mysterious Angela Parkins, and breaking free from her mother and her mother's lover in their roadside Mauve Motel. And then we are with Maude Laures as she reads Mauve Desert, this story of Mélanie, and becomes obsessed with it. She embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning, which leads us into the third part, Mauve, the Horizon, Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert - like all good translations, it is both the same and enticingly different from the original. Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive, exhilarating and erotic; Margaret Atwood says it's full of 'brilliant sparks and white hot fragments.' Originally published in 1990, Mauve Desert is a defining work of Canadian fiction and a perennial favourite.Publishers WeeklyMauve Desert is the first section in this three-part, postmodern, feminist fiction; in this novel-within-a-novel, 15-year-old Melanie, with a bad case of existential angst, finds comfort driving through the Arizona desert late at night. In the second section Maude Laures reads Mauve Desert , and ``her whole being plunges into the book.'' She thirsts for more than the short novel reveals, elaborates on the setting (photos portray her images of one character), decides to translate the book and imagines a conversation with the author. The final section is Laures's translation, which tells the same story with minor changes. Brossard (coauthor of Picture Theory ) focuses on issues of fiction to the exclusion of traditional development, neglecting concrete detail in favor of ideas and language. Characters speak in a stylized manner: Melanie, for instance, tells her mother ``your voice just superimposed itself on the mediocrity which in this Motel precludes all hope.'' The novel functions well as a literary game, but the original story is not strong enough to support the meta-literature that follows. Photos. (Dec.)
\ Publishers Weekly\ - Publisher's Weekly\ Mauve Desert is the first section in this three-part, postmodern, feminist fiction; in this novel-within-a-novel, 15-year-old Melanie, with a bad case of existential angst, finds comfort driving through the Arizona desert late at night. In the second section Maude Laures reads Mauve Desert , and ``her whole being plunges into the book.'' She thirsts for more than the short novel reveals, elaborates on the setting (photos portray her images of one character), decides to translate the book and imagines a conversation with the author. The final section is Laures's translation, which tells the same story with minor changes. Brossard (coauthor of Picture Theory ) focuses on issues of fiction to the exclusion of traditional development, neglecting concrete detail in favor of ideas and language. Characters speak in a stylized manner: Melanie, for instance, tells her mother ``your voice just superimposed itself on the mediocrity which in this Motel precludes all hope.'' The novel functions well as a literary game, but the original story is not strong enough to support the meta-literature that follows. Photos. (Dec.)\ \
