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An Appropriate Place

by Lise Bissonnette,Sheila Fischman, trans.

Lise Bissonnette’s An Appropriate Place is the sad tale of a Baby Boomer who becomes disenchanted with everything she’s achieved through feminism and Quebec nationalism. The novel opens with Gabrielle Perron, a bus driver’s daughter who has risen to become a force in Quebec’s intellectual and political life, stepping back from government at age 40 to begin a new life. She takes a condo apartment in a highrise in the Montreal suburb of Laval, takes a 19-year-old lover, and takes a look at the emotional toll her meteoric career has cost her.

The former editor of the influential Montreal daily Le Devoir and currently director of the province’s new Grande Bibliothèque, Bissonnette knows how to write graceful fiction: her three novels and a book of short stories all have been critical successes. The story she tells here is moving in its ultimate tragedy.

The reader familiar with the ins and outs of Quebec will find even deeper significance here. The novel takes place in the summer and fall of 1985. Quebec nationalists are tired, and in December the provincial Liberals under Robert Bourassa will win a landslide victory over the Parti Québécois. Though Bissonnette does not explore the impending defeat, Gabrielle can be seen as a symbol for the positive change in the glorious quarter century following the beginning of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution.

Instead Bissonnette concentrates on Gabrielle’s emotional deadness, her fatigue with intellectual games, the difficulty of reconciling the body and the spirit. Gabrielle gets involved in a benefit for AIDS; she makes a list of things to do for the rest of her life; and then tries to get away from her teenage lover, who is just as much a symbol of the intelligent but poorly educated, heartless younger generation as she is of hers. The conflict between them is an engrossing clash between new and old in which the old comes out the loser.

 

Reviewer: Mary Soderstrom

Publisher: House of Anansi Press, House of Anansi Press

DETAILS

Price: $18.95

Page Count: 144 pp

Format: Paper

ISBN: 0-88784-680-7

Released: Oct.

Issue Date: 2002-12

Categories: Fiction: Novels