Go Figure

Go Figure is the hauntingly beautiful tale of a Montreal couple alienated from each other after suffering the miscarriage of twin girls. Mammy, the wife of Rémi Vavasseur, has gone away. Not because she no longer loves him but because she no longer loves herself. She is criss-crossing Europe and Africa in the company of the dangerous and blonde Raïa, Rémi’s former mistress. Meanwhile, Rémi remodels a ramshackle house in rural Quebec, designed for Mammy, if she ever comes back, “in flesh and bed.” The novel is the journal that he keeps during their parallel journeys.

Ducharme’s writing, which has contributed to the recasting of the literary canon of Quebec, is full of echoes, juxtapositions and double meanings. With the likes of Marie-Claire Blais, Jacques Godbout and Michel Tremblay, Réjean Ducharme is one of the select québécois fiction writers who have contributed to the transformation of québécois letters since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

Reviews

“Boasts complex flavours that are so savoury and sustaining you may be compelled to go back for seconds …” —Montreal Review of Books


“To read Ducharme … is to get luxuriously lost in a chaotic mass of simultaneous, tangential and sometimes conflicting ideas. […] His writing is a delight, playing on words, creating double entendres and weaving different threads of narrative and thought …” —Rain Review of Books


“The key to Ducharme is his masterful yet playful command of language, his ability to use many if not all the meanings of a word at once and to redirect everyday expressions … This linguistic richness explains in part why Ducharme has barely been translated into English or other languages.”
—Montreal Gazette


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Go Figure is the hauntingly beautiful tale of a Montreal couple alienated from each other after suffering the miscarriage of twin girls. Mammy, the wife of Rémi Vavasseur, has gone away. Not because she no longer loves him but because she no longer loves herself. She is criss-crossing Europe and Africa in the company of the dangerous and blonde Raïa, Rémi’s former mistress. Meanwhile, Rémi remodels a ramshackle house in rural Quebec, designed for Mammy, if she ever comes back, “in flesh and bed.” The novel is the journal that he keeps during their parallel journeys.

Ducharme’s writing, which has contributed to the recasting of the literary canon of Quebec, is full of echoes, juxtapositions and double meanings. With the likes of Marie-Claire Blais, Jacques Godbout and Michel Tremblay, Réjean Ducharme is one of the select québécois fiction writers who have contributed to the transformation of québécois letters since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s.

Reader Reviews

Details

Dimensions:

256 Pages
9in * 229mm * 6in * 152mm * 0.75in19mm
340gr
12oz

Published:

September 15, 2003

City of Publication:

Vancouver

Country of Publication:

CA

Publisher:

Talonbooks

ISBN:

9780889224827

9781772011135 – PDF

9781772011111 – EPUB

9781772011128 – Kindle

9780889227316 – EPUB

Book Subjects:

FICTION / Literary

Featured In:

All Books

Language:

eng

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