Like an inspired seamstress deftly dipping her needle in and out of fine cloth, Gisèle Villeneuve creates a marvelous tapestry of a book in her first novel, Visiting Elizabeth.

The time is the end of the 1960s, and the place is the Montreal of Expo 67 and the cultural ferment that accompanied Quebec’s Quiet Revolution. Seventeen-year-old Claudette Lalancette, the narrator, has her picture taken by photographer Elizabeth Gold as she sews up a rip in her skirt on the last day of the World’s Fair.

Elizabeth uses the photo as the basis for a larger work of art, which she calls Ariane 1967, thus changing Claudette’s life, transforming her into Ariane Claude, and promising her a trip around the world.But on the afternoon they are to set off Elizabeth is struck by a car and killed. Claudette/Ariane must come to grips with the role she played in that death and with the many secrets of her own life.

Villeneuve tells her story non-linearly, the way an observer might take in an elaborate wall covering from the Middle Ages, with eyes darting from one detail to another and then returning again and again to the central image. Here Villeneuve’s stream-of-consciousness narrative leads us along, linking events separated by several months and evoking mysteries that the reader only slowly comes to understand.

That in itself is not a new technique, but Villeneuve adds a particularly Canadian – – or Québécois – dimension. Claudette/Ariane is completely, brilliantly bilingual, and her thoughts jump from one language to another, from a pun in English to a jeu de mot in French.

While the details of the clothes, jokes, wanderings, and sexual encounters of the characters are evoked with wonderful immediacy, the book’s strengths would have been more apparent if 50 pages or so had been cut.