L’Avalée des avalés by Rejean Ducharme (1966) - In Montreal, a Jewish man and a Polish Catholic woman are husband and wife. They also hate each other. In the midst of a '30-year war' each parent lays claim to a child and raises the child in that faith. As such, first-born Christian belongs to the woman and is raised catholic and second-born Berenice is raised in her father's faith.
This ultimately bears little importance on the actual writing of the book. At just under 400 pages, most of the book focused on Berenice's extreme misanthropic worldview and the bearing it has on her life (refusing to eat and getting seriously sick, killing two of her mother's cats in hard-to-read scenes, borderline incestuous feelings for her brother that get her shipped off to live with her orthodox uncle in NYC before finally getting shipped off to the ME to fight Arabs). All of which are related mostly in monologues written in a first-person POV in which it never gets better and her antisocial behavior steadies in an awful way.
385 pages of misanthropic rhetoric sounds like a tough read. I had to give up on Irvine Welsh's Filth specifically because of how tedious and repetitive his crap got in a massive volume. Well, this is different here. While I think that the book probably could have been trimmed a bit because it's hard not to repeat yourself at some point, Ducharme is on a whole other level compared to most other writers I've read. His voice and sense of rhythm feels singular and he is able to make passages that would seem nonsensical in most hands come across as completely appropriate for his book and the girl's voice. I'm not someone who is into poetry (though I do enjoy prose that can have a poetical lilt) but his prose is littered with sentences that read like a bouquet of roses being tossed even if it is sometimes ugly. Sometimes it's also funny as the girl's confidence and erudition make for a fun contrast with her speech.
Ducharme also does a great job of giving his girl just enough to hang unto to not give it all up. For example, Her love and letters for her brother and a friend are strange and ambiguous when it comes to intent and emotion but her father is so despicable that you can almost appreciate the act of rebellion. The book is littered with little touches like that that add up to a whole that's not always clear to the read, even by the end. Sometimes it feels rather scattered as her thoughts but not her life fills up the book through a period of about 10 years.
It's not the sort of book that would please a casual and/or novice reader but I thought it was superb, unique and highly artistic.
