DISCOVERIES

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO WAS TOO FOND OF MATCHES

By Gaetan Soucy

Translated from the French

by Sheila Fischman

Arcade: 138 pp., $19.95

At first, the reader wonders what sort of creature has written this strange fable. A gremlin? A medieval half-wit? A shut-in? In fact, the narrator is a wild child. A child raised, if you can call it that, by her insane father on an estate she is not allowed to leave.

She is 16 or so when she writes this account of her father’s death, which occurred 24 hours earlier. She thinks that she is a boy, with “inflations.” She cares for herself, her younger brother, horse and a strange creature in the vault who is ominously named “Fair Punishment.” She has read half the books in her father’s library and refers often to the “ethics of Spinoza” and “the bad flowers.” She and her brother are called upon to help their father in his strange rituals of self-flagellation, which she bears with equanimity only because she has no other life, no basis for comparison. Her thoughts are captured in phrases like “pupils filled with things that had been stepped on,” “music, you see, is an out-and-out debasement, a greedy octopus that feeds on us. Make music well up within a hundred meter radius and my heart is gone ... it bounces back like an elastic and pierces a hole in my chest.” She regularly experiences “stoppits,” a kind of seizure, like “an owl suffering an embolism.”

Credit Gaetan Soucy for writing such an original story and credit Sheila Fischman for translating a clearly difficult work. She preserves the awkward, many-layered meanings of Soucy’s phrases. The entire work depends on her vivid, self-created language: Its authenticity is such that even in the story’s most horrifying moments, it is possible to feel nothing, as she does, yet never stop turning the pages.

*

IN OUR STRANGE GARDENS

By Michel Quint

Translated from the French

by Barbara Bray

Riverhead Books: 163 pp., $12.95

“In Our Strange Gardens,” based on the life story of Michel Quint’s father, is told with all the regret of a son who failed to learn the lessons his father had to offer. As a young boy, Quint is terribly ashamed of his father, a teacher who dressed up and played a clown at local events. His father seems pathetic; the boy is always embarrassed by his “pathetic” mediocrity, until his father’s cousin, Gaston, describes the event that changed his father’s life. In 1943, his father and Gaston blow up a generator in their village, which is occupied by Germans. Afterward, they are arrested, thrown in a pit and told that they will be executed unless they reveal who blew up the generator. A kind soldier watches over the pit, at first offending them with clown-like faces and juggling with food on the edge of the muddy grave. Finally, he makes them laugh. He advises them not to tell the general in charge who did it. Ironically, an electrician, also a member of the Resistance, who was so badly burned in the explosion that he only has one month to live, takes the rap. Gaston marries the electrician’s widow. After the war, the narrator’s father takes up clowning in homage, and the German soldier goes on to become a movie director. It is the story of a man’s respect for his father, a “holy fool,” the ridiculous inhumanity of the German army and an ultimate victory.

*

HOTEL OF THE SAINTS

Stories

By Ursula Hegi

Simon & Schuster: 170 pp., $23

Ursula Hegi is a tumbledown, headlong sort of writer. Her words rush out, with meager punctuation, like children rolling down a hill, laughing. She unpeels her characters like artichokes. She takes rickety, empty lives and sees them beyond their plainness, until they glow with meaning--historical meaning--and become saints.

For example, the woman who falls in love with the ex-criminal: “And when I saw him that first time,” her story begins, “sleeping on the ground by the pond there was light all around him and I stood watching him till he opened his eyes and poured me the light and then he strapped his clothes and blanket into his tarp and followed me to my apartment and the food he cooked for me nourished me more than anything I had eaten for years. Already the weight of the lonely flesh was falling from me as his beauty filled me and even at the mall my customers said I had a glow that lit up the whole Sears.”

This collection is all about hagiography, how we pin our hopes on people and how we can create icons out of them. In “The Juggler,” for example, a mother worries about her daughter, who is marrying a blind man. “He’ll need you too much,” she warns her daughter, who replies, “That should feel familiar, then.” How we lean on each other. How we expect others to behave in ways we are not capable of ourselves. It’s so much easier to worship saints.