Bitter Rose

Bitter Rose / Martine Delvaux
trans. from the French by David Homel
Montreal: Linda Leith, 2015, c2009.
105 p.

This little book is really more of a novella; it's very short. And impressionistic too, in short chapters examining years of the narrator's childhood. Although Delvaux is a Quebecoise writer, this book feels a bit France-French as well. 

A young French girl moves to a Francophone community in rural Ontario; it's awful, dreary, depressing. Her friends have names like Manon-just-Manon and are generally neglected or outcasts. And girls go missing from this town, too. The years in this village are described with calm detachment, although it's clear she wants out of this dead-end place. 

When one girl too many disappears her mother decides it's time to leave, and they move to a shiny new suburb of Ottawa. The house, the other girls nearby and the lifestyle are described in much the same tone as the earlier part of the book. And after she leaves home to strike out on her own, she discovers that one of the girls she befriended there has also gone missing. 

This is a strange little story. Not much plot, just the slightly rambling discussion of childhood to adolescence to early maturity. The years fly by with a couple of impressions pinning them down. There doesn't seem to a real point to it, and the tone is so detached that I didn't really connect with it. It's a very cool French narrative, but I felt that this theme is one that's a bit overdone, and the style didn't really catch me either, despite the writing itself being very smooth and careful and well done. 

It's like a mix of Quebec Gothic and prairie realism, but unfortunately it left me a bit cold in the end.