LITERATURE: Confrontations No. 88/89 – One Must Speak of Sex in French

This story by Katherine Vaz took me longer to read since I found myself putting it down every few pages.  The reason is likely the feeling I got that it was disjointed and while as afterthought it was understandable, the multiple ways that Vaz used to do so was at first, annoying. 

The basic story is about a mother who is a ballerina and has a lover as well as a husband who is a good man but rather too nice; the daughter who gets shot in the kneecap at the schoolyard and who draws pictures of people with animal heads; the father who is a teacher, loves his wife and daughter, knows about his wife’s affair, and is simply trying to cope while sacrificing his own wants to theirs; the lover who sees the cycle of relationships from sensual to domestic happening again; his wife who he’s married because the great love of her life got her pregnant and then left and who is still adjusting to her own feelings about the man she lost and the man she married.

Point of view is always switching, with an asterisk that’s meant to help delineate the changes but in fact makes things more complicated since there is a lot of italicized text that is mainly used for place, a language change, thought, and conversation.  It doesn’t take long to get used to is, but just flipping through the pages makes it even appear as a non-linear, non-flowing narrative structure.  Time too is played with to a reasonable point, future–past–backstory–back to future which becomes past and onward from there.  And this is done several times because of the changing pov’s.

What bothered me a little is the use of the italics–which I believe also changed in its purpose–in such a juxtaposition with the characters and time.  I remember Cormac McCarthy in an interview answering the question of why he didn’t use quotation marks for dialogue and he said something to the effect that it was unnecessarily intruding upon the story. 

As far as the story itself, there was enough conflict within the characters themselves, along with the revealing of their innermost desires and their relationships with each other that both stifled and enhanced those desires to make it interesting.  Totally character-driven, though  we do wonder about if they have the insight of each other that the reader gains.