Material Girl: Becoming and Unbecoming in Marie Redonnet's Forever Valley

Marie Redonnet's Forever Valley (198) poses numerous riddles, many of which are never fully resolvable. The first puzzle is surely the title itself. The fact that the novel is named after the village where the first-person narrator lives fails to clarify why either name is in English, when the text itself is written in French. The location of the village is unclear, although it appears to be situated in some part of the Western world, or at least in a Westernized area, given the institutions that are found there: a presbytery, a church and a brothel (previously the school and town hall). The geographical details are no more helpful in placing Forever Valley. The region is dry and mountainous, but the lower valley supports dairy farms; it is located near a border. The temporal setting is similarly vague, although, again, there are clues: the brothel has electricity, but the presbytery and the lower valley do not (Forever Valley [FV] 19); the plumbing at the presbytery is primitive (FV 74). Jean-Claude Lebrun and Claude Prévost have described Redonnet's novels as "de curieuses régions, mi-réelles mi-irréelles": "[O]n se croit 'chez soi,' tout en étant quelque peu ailleurs" (194, 195). Katharine Gingrass-Conley speaks of "[t]he time-space dimension [... that] belongs more to the realm of mythology than to an historical world" (51).

Other elements of the text are equally elusive. The novel presents itself as a first-person account, and it reads something like a journal. The reader understands that time passes between chapters, as indicated by the ongoing developments in the plot. Nevertheless the narrator insists repeatedly that she is illiterate. She only recognizes one word at the beginning of the novel: "Le père [...] a essayé de m'apprendre à lire école et mairie, mais je mélange les deux mots. Je mélange tous les mots. [...] dancing [...]. C'est bien le seul mot que je peux lire" (FV 12-13). By the end she has learned only one other word, "barrage" (FV 124). The fact that the narrator never assigns herself either a first or last name is also highly provocative, and accords her an ambiguity consistent with that of the other characters. She lives in the presbytery with "le père," and it is impossible to know if he is a father (a priest), or her father (Van Der Starre 60). The other characters are identified only by their profession (le douanier en chef,les filles de la laiterie,les bergers), or are given only a first name—and an unusual one at that, at least in French: Massi is the proprietor of the brothel; Ted, Fred and Bob are among its clients. The story-line is also disconcerting, to say the least. The narrator, who we learn is a prepubescent sixteen-year-old girl, goes to work at Massi's brothel, with the father's blessing. But this eerie world possesses an accelerated temporality. Within just four weeks, her career as a prostitute will come to an end, and soon after Forever Valley will be flooded when a dam is built to provide hydroelectric power to what is only called "the lower valley." In spite of the passing of time and the many developments in the plot, however, the narrator will never mature physically.

Redonnet's corpus has been aptly compared to fairy tales, myths, fables, allegories, Biblical parables and dreams, both because of its indeterminate landscapes and characters, and because of the archetypal kinds of quests in which the protagonists are engaged. These characterizations are all the more appropriate given Redonnet's startlingly plain, even inelegant language. Seemingly mundane sentences are built from an extremely ordinary vocabulary: "Les phrases courtes se succèdent (sujet, verbe, complément), en suivant exactement le cours non-discriminatoire des choses" (Went-Daoust 388); "[s]es phrases sont...