Femmes Fatales

His latest discovery is Romanian-born Irina Egli, whose first novel was published by Boréal in 2006. Set in the port city of Constanta, Romania, on the Black Sea, Terre salée is an atmospheric love story charting the destruction of a middle-aged physician who falls into an obsessive love affair with his eighteen-year-old daughter. With a cast of high-strung characters and lush, confident prose reminiscent of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the novel revisits the Oedipal myth: a clear-eyed young beauty defeats her mother and her father’s mistress in a battle for his love.

Egli lives alone in an artfully decorated loft overlooking Montreal’s business core. She was born in Bucharest and published short stories and poetry before immigrating to Quebec in her mid-twenties, a decade ago. She speaks English fluently but chose to write fiction in French, a language she deems more literary and closer to her native Romanian.

An only child whose parents divorced when she was four, she rarely saw her father after he started a second family. “In most of my personal relations, I look for my father.” Terre salée tackles the missing person head on. The psyche of the lover, Alexandru, merits the most attention; Anda is presented as a poisonous siren who exploits the power of her beauty, but if the poet Ahoe’s sentiments are to be believed, not without purpose: “Men are small. Very small. Only unhappiness can turn them into giants. In their own eyes. Uniquely. Remember that!”

The second volume of her proposed trilogy, tentatively called Ange de passe, to be published by Boréal this fall, follows Anda to Montreal, where she undergoes a self-destructive purge of her demons by way of sexual experience.

“For a curious person, sex is a door,” says Egli. “You go through it — why not? Seduction is always about power, but finally the experience has to lead somewhere else. But where? We’re lost in the modern world, too pragmatic, material. Can we still believe in gods today? The Greeks knew a lot about the subject, the rituals and transcendent meaning of the flesh.” The trilogy, she says, is meant to be an exploration of how the pre-Christian themes of Greek mythology play out in modern characters and situations.

Sex as rebellion, revenge, adventure, boost to self-esteem, cry of desperation, bargaining chip in the quest for love, source of income — the current crop of new novels by young Quebec women investigates an enormous range of motivation. Yet there is precious little interest in pleasure.”

A generation has come along writing novels about sex that aren’t meant to be erotic,” says Lori Saint-Martin. “Quite the opposite, they’re often very sad, existential, inspired not by any sense of the erotic, but by the genre — auto-fiction, writing about yourself. One thing a young woman has to write about is her sex life. It’s a source of identity, a mystery, and of course power. There’s a huge narcissism involved, often self-hatred, and very little interest in exploring eroticism.” And yet, as Saint-Martin points out, publishers are quick to trade on their authors’ youth and sexual appeal, plastering book covers with steamy promises and photos of the writers wearing vixen smiles and provocative outfits. “The whole thing is quite ambiguous.”

In L’homme ligoté, Anne-Rose Gorroz tackles a sado-masochistic relationship. Each time the narrator and her lover meet, he presents her with another version of his desire, a kinky game that horrifies and fascinates her.

The dark side of eros propels Marie Hélène Poitras’s Soudain le Minotaure, published in Patricia Claxton’s translation as Suddenly the Minotaur by DC Books. A spare novella, it probes both the sexual fantasies of a serial rapist and his victims’ quest for healing. But by and large in the works considered here, missing along with pleasure is any hint of the redemptive potential of the sexual act.

The overarching presence of sex as power play may be a natural consequence of youth embracing a decayed taboo with audacity, the palace of wisdom being still a ways down the road of excess. Yet an aura of solipsism, even self-absorption, lingers. Arcan’s latest novel goes furthest in attempting to grapple with the wider social implications of complete sexual licence. In À ciel ouvert, one of the two main characters, Rose, muses on the cruelly competitive world in which women are driven to despise each other and mutilate their bodies in order to land a man. Her diagnosis is essentially material: there are far more beautiful young women on the Plateau Mont-Royal than there are fuckable men—hence the brutality of the game.