Hôtel Septième-ciel et autres histoires by Claire Dé (review)

progresses, reports seep through of friendships, love affairs, family ties, and intellectual affinities, but these are not openly evidenced through any interactions of the characters. Perhaps this serves David’s intention: not to give us the love story promised on the dust cover but something that feels more like love’s antithesis . To be sure, David has, in her lyric descriptions, the astonishing prose of an accomplished poet. This and the fact that the last half of the book picks up speed to come to a surprising conclusion should make the novel worth the read. Still speed is relative. One must, in the last chapters, experience a “car chase” that covers half the European continent and several days to get within striking distance of the conclusion! Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March DÉ, CLAIRE. Hôtel Septième-ciel et autres histoires. Montréal: Triptyque, 2011. ISBN 9782 -89031-726-0. Pp. 154. $19 Can. The bio-blurb on the back cover of this rich collection of short stories offers this very brief description of the author: “Pièce de mobilier des années 1950, avec ce que cela comporte d’angles bizarres, de couleurs voyantes, et de bois poli.” With these eighteen stories revealing an authorial voice inflected with such complex shapes, textures, and hues, Dé returns to the literary scene after some thirteen years since her last publication to offer a fascinating amalgam of tales that give life to a dynamic writerly presence as they paint a vibrant view of Montreal, the principal setting for most of the collection. The opening story, “Rencontre avec une ogresse,” points to an authorial mode that carries through many of the texts: time, through memory and projection, both condenses and expands in fanciful bursts of color-filled imagery. Constructed as an interview of the author set in 2018, this tale looks “back” on the joys and difficulties of a life as auteure, Québécoise, Montréalaise, whose writing and, ultimately, whose very being is marked by “bizarreries stylistiques” (15). Wearing such self-conscious eccentricities with as much grace and humility as the narrator wears a gifted “bague de fée” (19) in the immediately following story, the Dé who appears in her autofictional texts shines with her own “feux improbables” (21) as she reflects radiance from her city, her friends, her sympathies, her readings. Themes of remembrance and creation mark many of the tales. Two stories placed early in the collection, “Quatre mottons de poils” and “Lesley Chadwick,” confirm the primordial, if sometimes painful role memory plays in the making of one’s self, just as the final tale, “Hôtel Septième-ciel,” celebrates the creative process in which the writer, agonizingly and dazzlingly aware of her remembered experiences, comes to reinvent a world while giving the best of herself in her pages. The remembered and creative life is frequently troubling, if finally rewarding. “Encore une tentative” speaks to the potential attraction of suicide but draws on the words of another “femme de lettres” (95), George Sand, to offer the exhortation to live fully and richly. In its mere twenty-nine lines, the brief, dense “Chienne de vie” offers a meditation on the poverty of quotidian routines, saved from life-stilling boredom only in the awareness that “l’Art repaît l’âme de son mystère” (76). For our author, that art can well take form in the verve of a “mot inusité” (118) that keeps dullness and death at a distance. In many of these stories, Reviews 783 the city of Montreal is not mere background but, rather, primary presence as subject and object of the writer’s remembrance and creation of emotional meaning. “Auprès de ma blonde, aguyase!” presents the city as a lover, “ma dulcinée” (40), whose forms, movements, and senses provoke swoons and smiles. This lover is not a jealous one, its prodigious delights nourishing the charms of those who would live in its embrace. Generous, the city sparks generosity. “En quelques pas, rue Ontario” goes on to name not only the lover’s byways but some of the discoveries made in and on them. A child’s dance cut short, a book...