Juliette ou Les morts ne portent pas de bigoudis par Pénélope Mallard (review)

This charming first novel invites multiple readings; or one might say it steadily refuses closure. Alternation flows from the title itself: is this the coming-of-age narrative of Juliette, a young Québécoise returning home to the city of Rimouski after completing her studies in France? Or does the narrative more broadly encompass the network of family members, some living but most dead (and straight-haired, as the title suggests), who form Juliette's matrix of memories, teachings, values shared or rejected? At home or abroad, Juliette's family is inescapable, as she goes about her everyday life accompanied by the unruly ghost of Momone, her grandmother, the genie-like inhabitant of a rose-colored teakettle. The marvelous and the mundane go hand in hand here: Momone's haunted teakettle is stowed as a piece of (unruly) carry-on baggage; Tonton Anatole appears to possess the secrets of telekinesis, but he also knows a killer recipe for salad vinaigrette; Juliette loses focus during a medical exam and dialogues with Claude Monet himself by way of a Giverny landscape hanging in the doctor's office. Juliette is comprised of eighteen chapters, each of which may be read as an independent short story: a "roman par nouvelles," as the title page announces. Aristotelian dramatic structure is utterly rejected in favor of loosely interwoven vignettes that loop back and forth in time and space. Although Juliette's matrilineal ancestors settled in Quebec and (literally) put down deep roots in the New World, she and various family members crisscross the Atlantic as the scene shifts: from World War II-era Paris to farmland in Bretagne to coastal Quebec. Matrilineal heritage both enriches and weighs down Juliette and her extended (mostly female) family circle: gorgeous but sinister heirlooms; genetic predispositions toward twins and toward rheumatoid arthritis; a shared love of gardens and growing things. Where Juliette's dour father believes in stoic acceptance of life's misery—"La vie est une vaste tartine de merde, Juliette. Il faut en manger un peu tous les jours" (37)—Juliette's own philosophy seems more energetic, free-spirited, and inclusive: "Les graines, c'est à tout le monde. Ça doit circuler, ça doit se promener" (109). Such a de-territorialized worldview may strike readers as a bit rosy-colored. When Juliette is welcomed onto a small island in the Saint-Lawrence river by a delegation of gracious, multi-ethnic ghosts, one can't help but wonder what happened to the centuries of strife and territorial aggression among these Iroquois, Micmacs, Scottish, French, Basques, even Vikings who traded violent possession of the territory. Can a ghost story that takes place in a multinational, inter-generational setting not be haunted by a grim colonial past? Evidently, it can. Mallard's delightful, uncanny fable with its unconventional heroine(s) invites readers to suspend some of our beliefs as well as our disbelief, and to refocus our attention on the everyday miracles of forests, fields, and gardens.