Titles > Fiction > The Body's Place
enlarge image
The Body's Place
by Élise Turcotte
Translated by Sheila Fischman
Novel
220 pages
Trade Paper w/ French Flaps
5.5 " X 8.5"
ISBN: 1896951465
$22.95
The Body's Place
by Élise Turcotte
Translated by Sheila Fischman
Helene, 15, lives with her younger sister and brother and their parents in a house near a river with an island. School is out for the summer, it's hard to find things to do to ward off boredom, but Helene finds work in a garage. A girl her age has gone missing and, eventually, her murdered body is found on the island, I'ile de la merci. In this atmosphere of violence and fear, Helene tries to understand the silences in her house, the sexual yearnings she's beginning to experience, the eloquent lure of nothingness — of death. This summer will mark the end of a certain innocence and the beginning of a journey of discovery of the body and its place.
About Élise Turcotte.
About Sheila Fischman.
| Reviews: |
| A
teenager's murder and it's impact on a young girl is at the heart
of Elise Turcotte's deceptively simple and disturbing novel. Awkwardly translated as The Body's Place (it's original, 1997 title, Ille de la merci, is no less abstract), the story describes the horrifying modern dilemma of Helene, a 15 year-old Montrealer whose classmate is raped, murdered and left under brush on a island. Helene is obsessed with the girl's final moments, her last words, her dying thoughts. Helene clips passages from papers and creates a scrapbook, all the while wondering about her own body - how if fits into community and how not. By situating her novel at the axis of a teenage girl's natural interest in pleasurable eroticism and death as aspects of a changing psyche, and the fury and destructiveness of a violent murder, Turcotte makes her parallel motifs of Eros and Thanatos echo and resonate between light and shadow. Turcotte, a prize-winning writer and professor of creative writing at a Montreal CEJEP, has created a shimmering surface that moves in and out of concreteness and abstraction. She adroitly catches the mind of a teen, and the burden on a community in emotional turmoil. She has subtle insights into the mind of children and how the world impinges on them with too much news, too much information and not enough love even "in small doses." — Geoff Hancock, The Globe and Mail August 30, 2003 •••• Cormorant does an admirable job of breaking down regional barriers. A [dark] note is struck in The Body's Place. This is the world as seen through the eyes of 15-year-old Hélène, the oldest child of Robert and Viviane, an unhappily married couple in a Montreal suburb. The obsessive Hélène begins to fill a scrapbook with gruesome crime stories she clips from newspapers. She speculates endlessly about what the victim felt and endured before she died. She attends a memorial service for [a] dead girl, though she didn't know her, and gets into a sexual relationship with a boy she meets at that service. — Verne Clemence, Saskatoon Star-Phoenix July 12, 2003 Read the complete review here. |
