The Faerie Devouring
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A modern-day fable and mythic bildungsroman, The Faerie Devouring tells the story of a young girl raised by her grandmother (a stalwart matriarch and wicked fairy godmother) following her mother's death during childbirth. The absent mother haunts the story of this girl whose greatest misfortune is to have been born female.
In this critically-acclaimed coming-of-age story by Quebecois author Catherine Lalonde, and translated by Oana Avasilichioaei, questions of what it means to be born female and grow into a woman are explored. The story is rife with song, myth, phantasmagoria, spells, desire, ferocious poetic telling, wild imagination, and unruly language. Lalonde uses the form of a disenchanted and metaphorical fable to recount what it means to find a life force in one's lineage, even when one is born into "nothing."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a painful parallel to the foreboding message inside its pages that women are destined only for lives of tiresome toil getting through the translation of this self-styled modern fairy tale takes effort. The threadbare plot focuses on a young rural Canadian girl, referred to only as the sprite, and follows her from birth through young adulthood using a series of disjoined tableaus the death of her mother in childbirth, sleeping in a drawer rather than a crib, running wild through a field, spilling bathwater with her adoptive brothers, hunting small game in the woods, and so on while prophesying that she will inevitably meet her doom by accidentally getting pregnant and entering a sort of domestic hell. Lalonde's stream of consciousness style sometimes results in lush, lyrical descriptions ("Sounds reach her from afar: life hushed by metal and isolation"), and other times gives vent to little more than confusing gibberish ("The spent mother's face, turned inside out, humped, full of secretions; visage become vagina"). Readers may be disturbed by scenes of incestuous sex and repeated references to a family member as "the mongoloid who only half counts." Those intrigued by praise for the original in French will be frustrated and disappointed by this translation.
