16 May 2011

Gaétan Soucy, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, 1998

A deliberately difficult book to form any kind of mental dialogue with, its talkative narrator being a nameless teenage girl whose weird father dies in the first paragraph. With her and her brother never having been beyond the boundaries of their home, her perspective is particularly unique and discomfiting when she becomes forced to deal with the outside world. She also has a gender identity problem, and this is totally embedded into her narrative to the extent that the reader also becomes unsure, and from there the nightmare gets progressively worse. An impressive, disturbing and cunningly told story, with very menacing undercurrents.  PY

MORE ON GAÉTAN SOUCY : THE CANADIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA   |  WIKIPEDIA

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