Following the Summer

Following the Summer / Lise Bissonnette
translated from the French by Sheila Fischman
Toronto: Anansi, c1993.
112 p.

I picked up this slim Quebecois novel in a recent second hand bookstore trip. I hadn't read Lise Bissonnette before; she's best known as a journalist and the publisher of Le Devoir in the 80s/90s. But this is what I think of as a typical Quebec novel -- all about small, stifling towns and the struggle for connection with others.

Marie is our main character; she is young, 20 years old, and is spending a hot and oppressive summer sitting in the park knitting, pondering life and considering options for escape. She lives in a mining town with a dying mining industry. Bissonnette describes the pollution in the water, both the look of it and the smell. There's also the fact that most of the men from this town go elsewhere to find work, leaving the young women to end up marrying many of the immigrant workers who will take the crap jobs no one else wants.

She's primly middle-class, described as wearing:

"...a beige dress, dowdy now with its sober flowers, its (genuine) patent leather belt which matches the sandals exactly. Marie is a catalogue image with her carefully waved hair, her discreet earrings."

Then, across the park and into her life comes Corrine, a barmaid dressed in " black slacks and the orange blouse...and hair burnt by a cheap black dye-job", whose loud love of life and sexual openness attract Marie to her despite the feeling that she shouldn't be associating with someone like this. They begin to meet regularly at the park.

Their clothes represent a lot about them. Marie "has been taught beige, white, loose, she has learned parsimony in her choice of clothes for summers that are too brief." Corinne, in contrast, "always looks different, squeezed into tight-fitting blouses, skintight camisoles, slacks that fit tightly at ankle and hips, in blue, green, orange, in black streaked with red."

We hear about Corrine's life as a barmaid and her partner, an Italian mine worker who is slowly losing his mind. Corrine does what she wants, she doesn't take her partner's jealousy seriously, she openly has sex with others, once right in front of Marie.

Marie meanwhile meets and becomes engaged to Ervant, an Eastern European immigrant worker who is different enough to hold her attention. His story of his distant past in Vienna and across Europe enthralls her.

This summer Marie sees possibility -- how she could become a different kind of person, less middle class, more like Corrine or Ervant. Or how she could leave this dingy town behind forever and change the course of her life.

But at the end of the story, it's Corrine who's gone, and Marie who is settling into a life that looks like it will follow the lives of all the other women in this small town. Her youthful dreams of escape have turned to resignation and a vision of becoming just like her mother and all the women before her.

I'm not sure what I thought of this book. The writing was well done, and the structure was excellent. Short chapters read like glimpses into Marie's experiences over the course of a year or two -- her thoughts interspersed -- and descriptive flights that are not flowery, but very realistic and earthy. But it's a bit depressing, and the intense focus, almost obsession, on sex as life, as escape, as vitality, was also a bit off putting. Is this the only thing that Marie can think of that might give her life meaning?

The dusty, lonely, oppressive small town is almost a cliché, and Marie's longing for love adds to that feel. But the writing and the style of this book save it from predictability, and it has a certain something to it that kept me reading.