The Woman Who Walks on Glass

On the shore of the St. Lawrence River, when she is not anchored to her worktable, listening to the village steeple which sounds the angelus at the wrong time, a writer paces the beach. She collects multicoloured pieces of glass that the tide has made soft as pebbles. There are brown ones and green, white ones and more rarely, blue, "Noxzema blue," the most precious. Whenever she finds one her heart beats faster. Each is unique, a small miracle, the fruit of a long and patient work of the elements, of chance. She classifies them carefully.At the same time she collects characters, characters who gradually inhabit her white page. There's a couple who visit Bruges and realize that nothing will ever be the same again; a student who peels an orange instead of writing his dissertation on happiness; a woman who comes home to an empty apartment that her companion has just left forever. There is the little girl who turns herself into a filmmaker to shoot scenes with her dolls having sex, and there are children at summer camp shut up in their bedroom, waiting for their mother, on the night Marilyn Monroe died.In these stories Christiane Frenette demonstrates the ways in which life works on beings, making us witnesses at the elusive moment when their deepest truth shows through the surface.

Christiane Frenette is the author of the Governor General's Literary Award-winning novel, Terre Firme, as well as the acclaimed novels, La nuit entiFre and AprFs la nuit rouge; of these three books, the first two have been translated by Sheila Fischman and are available under the titles Terra Firma and The Whole Night Through. AprFs la nuit rouge won the Prix littTraire ville de QuTbec in 2006. Christiane is also the author of several collections of poetry, including CTrTmonie mTmoire, and Indigo nuit, for which she received the Prix Octave-CrTmazie. Sheila Fischman is one of Canada's most distinguished and honoured literary translators. She has translated the works of Jacques Poulin, Frantois Gravel, +lise Turcotte, and Pascale Quiviger, among many others. For her work, she has been nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award, the Canada Council Translation Prize, and the FTlix-Antoine Savard Prize, each of which she has won. In 2001, she was named to the Order of Canada in recognition of the excellence of her work. Sheila Fischman lives in Montreal.