First published in 1987, Nicole Brossard's classic novel returns to Coach House in a new edition. A seminal text in Canadian and feminist literature,
Mauve Desert
is a must-read for readers and writers alike.
This is both a single novel and three separate novels in one. In the first,
, fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor chasing fear and desire, cutting loose from her mother and her mother's lover, Lorna, in their roadside Mauve Motel. In the second book, Maudes Laures reads
, becomes obsessed with it, and embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning. The third book –
Mauve, the horizon
– is Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert. Like all good translations, it is both the same and revealingly different from the original.
Nicole Brossard's writing is agile and inventive; from moment to moment gripping, exhilarating and erotic. Her language drifts and swells like sand dunes in a desert, cresting and accumulating into a landscape that shifts like wind and words; she translates the practice of translation, the pulse of desire.