I know, I know. It's been since August 12th. That's pretty abysmal. It's a combination of a tough time I had mid-August, a book that I had trouble getting through, and my procrastination when it came to writing the review. I knew it wasn't going to be a positive one."Elle", by Douglas Glover is heralded as many things in quotes from reviews on the back cover, to the description of the book. Glover's writing is "witty, smart and extremely funny". I definitely judged the front cover (as I am really trying not to do) until I flipped it over and read this as part of the description of the book on the back cover: "In a carnal whirlwind of myth and story, of death, lust and love, of beauty and hilarity, Glover brings the past violently, and unexpectedly into the present." Did I also mention that it's a GG winner? I put the cover out of my mind and dug in.I'll set the scene: A young, rich French woman (Marguerite) is aboard a ship headed for Canada. She is part of Jacques Cartier’s last, ill-fated attempt to colonize North America. She accidentally kills the captain's dog so as punishment, is marooned on the desolate Isle of Demons with her old nurse and her lover, Richard - a star tennis player. (I know, right?)This is a story of survival against the odds. As I'm sure you can imagine (slight spoiler here, but it's within the first 30 pages or so), the other two die and she's left to fend for herself. Up to this point in the story, the stage is set for an exciting adventure. What ends up happening to this early promise, however, is a series of encounters with indigenous people, animals, and nature all told through the eyes of Marguerite in a series of indistinguishable anecdotes. We are led to believe that she has an extremely high fever for a good period of her time on the island, and when she's not ill and awake she is dreaming. Marguerite thinks she's awake, but then sees that the woman caring for her has turned into a bear so she must be dreaming - perhaps not so. Then our heroine herself starts turning into a bear. It all got very confusing but I kept thinking that once her fever broke, or she got to know the people, the story would clear itself up and we would get some good... I don't know, hunting scenes, or learning herbal medicine from the bear/woman scenes. Not the case. Once things clear up, the story takes a different turn and then it basically ends.I have a pretty good sense of humour and I did not find anything particularly funny about this book, or the writing. There were a lot of scenes with gratuitous sex, and having just read "Lullaby for Little Criminals", I shouldn't be saying that about a piece of historical fiction on the colonization of Canada. "Elle" was also billed as a novel "based on a true story". I understand that this is to mean that it was a tale told over and over again both in France and Canada and it's part of the history of both of these places - that a "bear-woman" was marooned on the Isle of Demons. It's quite a romantic story, but it just doesn't come across that way in the novel. I consistently felt like I couldn't relate to our heroine because I didn't trust her to truthfully tell me her story. I wasn't sure what was real and what wasn't.At one point, there's actually quite a nice scene where she gives an indigenous man the mistaken image that she is born from the belly of a polar bear. (To give the guy some credit, it died, she was cold, she took off all her clothes, split open it's belly and got in.) If any of you have read "Galore" by Michael Crummey, you'll link that with the image of the main character, Judah, emerging mute and albino from the belly of a whale at the beginning of the book. When I started thinking more about "Galore", I realized how well Crummey had told a story dealing with very similar themes to "Elle", namely, magical realism. It made me realize, though, that in "Galore", the magical realism never got in the way of the story. It was simply a part of it. You would occasionally wonder how certain things were possible, but you believed the narrator and enjoyed the folkloric aspect of the story.I wanted to like this book. I wanted to like all the books on the Canada Reads List. I am sad to say that I didn't like this one and I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone else. When I sat down to write this review and really thought about the bare-bones of the story, I see that it had potential to be all the things it claimed. I just don't think it worked that way for me. I would love to hear from someone who enjoyed this book. I think it might help me to see how it won the GG - something I am very curious about.
The author states in his essay "Novels and Dreams" from The Attack Of The Copula Spiders that "The best novels are like dreams." Well, I beg to differ. I think a level of concreteness, at least some sense of reality, needs to be maintained to convince a reader the story is true, or the story's truths are true. I think I learned a lot about what I like in story. I need to be sold on a story's plausibility and I wasn't with Elle.Tennis racquets? The woman knows (women didn't know anything in 1542) what M. Cartier does when she has never been in his presence, understands religious conflict and persecution of the day, is an expert on literature, politics, money, new world discovery, and tennis. A tennis player is on a voyage to the new world in 1542 for the sole reason of making us laugh when a savage shows up wearing tennis racquets. Even as the story, if I can call it that, unfolds, she cannot get it through her ursine head that these are snowshoes. She is painted as an illiterate bimbo. Smacks of artificialness. The bear symbolism got sickening. She gets plopped by a bear, sleeps in a bear, eats bear, wears bear, dreams of bears, turns into a bear, sleeps with a bear, owns a bear, wants to be a bear and live in the new world? Bear, bear, bear. Dream, dream, dream. Lives naked on a sub-arctic island wearing only pillows and living in a hut made out of branches found on a treeless island. Any other human would be a popsicle. Dog jumps overboard -- stupid dog deserves to die -- but returns with a savage. Seriously? I am supposed to believe such nonsense? Fur or no, no land animal survives that water for more than minutes. Dream or no, these creations felt like something a middle-schooler would come up with. Ad hominem does not convince me it works.DG's writing, otherwise, is delectable. It is a difficult read for someone three decades behind in his vocabulary. I jotted pages and pages of notes. But I learned a lot about writing, I hope. The lists and excessive parentheticals were fun, though somewhat distracting. The humor was mostly funny. Even in its dreamy parts it flowed forward. I rarely skimmed.But lets revisit the dream thing. This story does not follow conventional paradigms. It does not easily trace to the monomyth. I fight over such things; I claim all stories follow the majority of the hero's journey phases; stories that do not are flawed. For me, this story is flawed. I am not drawn forward by its conflict and progression but by its rhythms and images, by its dreaminess. I want to know the meaning of bears. I want to know how she exacts revenge on the uncle. I want to know if she has sex with savages -- she has sex with everybody else. But these desires of mine are not elucidated in the prose. They are broad, macr0-level objectives not born out by character action. The story is mumbled by the sleepwalking dreamer, and I want to say the story is overly MFA, sickeningly so, and forgets about authenticity, empathy, and plausibility. I shook my head when I first read those words that the best novels are like dreams. Maybe they are, but maybe they merely need dreamlike sequels to examine truths being shown, but not like this, not an entire story as a dream. Even sleep-walkers have their feet on the ground.
Do You like book Elle (2003)?
The first few pages really put me off this book, being a bit crass. However, it had one the Governor General's Awards, so I kept reading and discovered it to be a very interesting novel. The story of a young French woman traveling to the New World. She experiences Canada in a way she never would have imagined and was forever transformed by her experiences. This novel paints a more real picture of the culture of exploration at the time, not allowing much room for the glorification of historical explorers. This book does a good job of capturing the mystery of Canada's landscape. I would definitely recommend this novel. Here is a link to my blog post on the novel.
—Andrea
In 1542, a young woman is abandoned on an island in the St Lawrence River along with her lover, Richard, and her nurse, Bastienne. And so begins a novel evoking Robinson Crusoe and the fantastic constructions of Rabelais. While also suggesting several other literary models, the novel probably is meant to function as an allegory for the culture shock of European-Amerind contact in the New World. Though I found the dreamlike middle sequence a little too kaleidoscopic for my taste, the opening is strongly naturalistic and authentic, and the last part, in which Elle returns to France and begins to reorient herself, thoroughly engaging. This final section is especially enlivened when Rabelais himself becoms a character. I liked the author's verbal energy and wordplay, and I liked that the novel is hilarious.
—James Murphy
Douglas Glover’s ELLE is a tale of a young woman who was abandoned on an island in the mouth of the St. Lawrence river in 1542. Thoroughly researched, this story is based on the true tale of Marguerite de la Rocque. Elle (her name is never given in the novel) is deposited by her uncle with her lover and nursemaid. The reason for this rather cruel treatment is that he has discovered her with her lover and disapproves, to the extent that he sentences her to an almost certain death. But Elle doesn’t die. She survives the deaths of her lover and nursemaid. She survives the oncoming winter which bring ice, snow and bears. She survives a clash of cultures, and…but I won’t say more so as not to spoil this wonderful novel for you.If you like tall tales, mesmerizing writing, and a spunky heroine whose voice possesses a sweet wryness, then this book is for you. It won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, and it is easy to see why. Five stars.
—Cynthia Haggard
