Audrée WilhelmyThe Body of the Beasts by Susan Ouriou

Abstract

Audrée Wilhelmy The Body of the Beasts Trans. Susan Ouriou. Toronto. Arachnide Editions. 2019. 192 pages. QUEBECOISE AUTHOR Audrée Wilhelmy ’s third novel chronicles the Borya family’s experiences in fictional Sitjaq’s rugged terrain. Unexpected intimacies erupt and complications ensue. This is also true of the relationships between the author’s books: a key character here, Noé, was introduced in Wilhelmy’s debut, Oss, and her most recent novel, also only in French, connects with all her previous works. Wilhelmy challenges our ideas about familial ties against a possibly postapocalyptic landscape. This is world-building in which the relational landscape is even more important than forest and sea. Trawlers look like “candies bobbing out on the waves,” and there is an “echo of songs ricocheting off rock faces,” but the family tree overshadows geography: Mie draws “its intertwined roots and branches in the sand dozens of times” in her effort to understand, but it’s not at all like the “trees of frogs or wolves, cranes, ducks, otters. Nowhere has she found anything similar.” The relationship between the natural and supernatural is fluid. Wilhelmy forces readers to reconsider interactions between humans and other animals while leaving readers to unravel whether the characters’ relationships with reality have been fractured or transformed. Above all, this is a story of becoming and a recognition of dual natures. Rows of pine trees “protect the village but lay siege to it, too.” And mothers have laps, but they also have lairs. Wilhelmy incorporates archetypal elements to recast the relationship between predator and prey. The language is stark, punctuated with occasional discomfiting and painful images: Books in Review Yonatan Berg Frayed Light Trans. Joanna Chen. Middletown, Connecticut. Wesleyan University Press. 2019. 92 pages. THE HEBREW LANGUAGE has a special term for the process of becoming less religious, which translates as “to revert to a mode of questioning” (Lahzor Be She’ela). It is a term that expresses an awakening, a skepticism about what has been, until now, believed unconditionally, an opening of what was considered closed. This frame of mind forms the backdrop of Frayed Light, the first translated collection of work by the Israeli poet and novelist Yonatan Berg. “In conversations I cannot explain myself,” Berg writes in “Letter to the Reader,” the opening poem of the collection , and proceeds to interrogate and explore, through lyrical form and language , the curious and complex path his life has taken thus far. Berg, born in 1981 to a Russian immigrant father and Israeli mother, was raised in Psagot, a religious settlement in the West Bank that borders on the Palestinian city of Ramallah. After receiving a religious education, he served as a combat soldier in the IDF, a period that included the last war in Gaza, and an outbreak of post-traumatic stress syndrome . What followed was a long process of self-searching through travel (in India and South America), study (he is an accredited bibliotherapist), and writing. In 2012 Berg was awarded the prestigious Yehuda Amichai Prize, the youngest poet to receive it. His first novel, Five More Minutes, received the 2015 Ministry of Culture prize. Several YONATAN BERG 96 WLT WINTER 2020 sores cleaned with tongues, a bird’s body imprinted on a dusty window, a cachelot’s carcass, and jellyfish “swollen like blisters on the smooth face of the beach.” Wilhelmy incorporates elements of classic feminist Quebecoise writers like Anne Hébert and Marie-Claire Blais, with fairy-tale motifs, interior ruminations, and unanswerable questions. She echoes the thematic concerns of more recent writers, like Andrée Michaud and Élise Turcotte, who examine burgeoning sexuality against a backdrop of potential and actualized violence . And she joins other emerging writers , like Julie Demers and Mikella Nicol, whose spare prose explores the boundaries between social constraints and the wilderness around us and within us. The Body of the Beasts is a visceral story with wings: rhythmically beating, it both suffocates readers and prepares us to soar. Marcie McCauley Toronto Maaz Bin Bilaal Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu New Delhi. Yoda Press. 2019. 126 pages. THE GHAZAL, a form of Urdu poetry with a certain meter and rhyme, made its excursion into...