The Faerie Devouring

In a painful parallel to the foreboding message inside its pages—that women are destined only for lives of tiresome toil—getting through the translation of this self-styled modern fairy tale takes effort. The threadbare plot focuses on a young rural Canadian girl, referred to only as the sprite, and follows her from birth through young adulthood using a series of disjoined tableaus—the death of her mother in childbirth, sleeping in a drawer rather than a crib, running wild through a field, spilling bathwater with her adoptive brothers, hunting small game in the woods, and so on—while prophesying that she will inevitably meet her doom by accidentally getting pregnant and entering a sort of domestic hell. Lalonde’s stream of consciousness style sometimes results in lush, lyrical descriptions (“Sounds reach her from afar: life hushed by metal and isolation”), and other times gives vent to little more than confusing gibberish (“The spent mother’s face, turned inside out, humped, full of secretions; visage become vagina”). Readers may be disturbed by scenes of incestuous sex and repeated references to a family member as “the mongoloid who only half counts.” Those intrigued by praise for the original in French will be frustrated and disappointed by this translation. (Nov.)