Books in Review
The minimalistic and uncanny stories
contain enough of everyday life—french
fries, ailing parents, exact change—to make
the incursions of strange figures like a mer-
man, or a teenager who eats only live birds,
seem acceptable, even plausible. Often com-
pared to her compatriots Julio Cortázar and
Jorge Luis Borges, Schweblin does share
their mastery of short fiction. Her eerie,
not-quite-right settings, however, hearken
to contemporaries like Mario Bellatín and
Haruki Murakami.
The title story, “A Mouthful of Birds,”
explores a father’s fascination with his
inability to relate to the new habits of his
pubescent daughter, which include dining
exclusively on live sparrows that her mother
delivers in shoeboxes. The symbols of blood
and milk that point to looming womanhood
in that story reappear in the collection,
which make gender difference and parent-
child relations seem alien and therefore
questionable.
Other stories play with Tolstoy’s famed
trope of a stranger coming to town. In
some cases, as in the collection’s opening
story, “Headlights,” newlyweds at a rest
stop discover they are part of a tradition of
abandonment and suffering; in “Irman,” the
narrator discovers the inexplicable violence
of their traveling companion at a lonely
roadside diner.
In “Olingiris,” about two women who
meet in their rather inexplicable line of
work, one of them remembers how, as a
child, “[s]he wrote a poem about fish, but
invented fish. She wrote about what she
felt sometimes in the morning, when she
was just waking up and sometimes didn’t
fully know who she was or where. About
the things that made her happy, about the
things that didn’t, and about her father.”
Schweblin invites us to linger in that dis-
oriented place between sleep and waking,
in order to see what we accept as natural
and permanent with new eyes and, perhaps,
imagine another way.
Julie Ann Ward
University of OklahomaJulie Delporte
This Woman’s Work
Trans. Aleshia Jensen & Helge Dascher.
Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2019. 256
pages.The first thing you notice about This Wom-
a n’s Wo r k is the image of struggle on the
cover—a girl pushing away a polar bear—a
metaphor that is investigated more fully
within. Next come pages of evocative line
drawings awash with color in a slightly
muted yet rich palette. The text is intimate
and self-revelatory and takes the form of a
journal, but if this is a diary of sorts, it is one
that is informed by a much larger arena than
the self: that of the role of women and espe-
cially women artists in a
world that privileges men.
Julie Delporte is a
French-speaking artist
and writer whose work
is steeped not only in her
own experience of being
an artist but in her per-
ceptions and reading of
women artists through
time. This book was origi-
nally intended as an explo-
ration of Tove Jansson, the
mid-twentieth-centuryFinnish artist and writer best known for
creating the Moomins, a family of trolls
whose adventures are adored by children.
But the narrative evolves with Jansson as
not the subject but as an inspiration for
Delporte as she travels in Jansson’s footsteps
to Finland and Greece. In fact, the essence
of this graphic memoir is the quest for a
role model, a woman artist who is not tied
to the male gaze. Hence, there are cameo
appearances by Chantal Akerman, Genev-
iève Castré, and an homage to Kate Bush,
whose song gave the English translation its
title, as well as images drawn in the style of
Mary Cassatt and other women artists.
Delporte’s struggle with her male part-
ners, her own self-confidence as an artist,
her early sexual trauma, and her fear of
motherhood come to some resolution with
a dream of women who live communally
and raise orphan girls. But it is, of course,
a fantasy, and Delporte must come back to
the real world where she ends as she begins,
with a fear of pregnancy. There is anguish
here as well as a good deal of naïveté, as
befits a young woman for whom a large
question seems to be whether a man would
be able to live with a feminist. Of course,
we are informed by our language, and, as
Delporte notes, in her native French the
masculine always takes precedence over the
feminine. The book is beautifully drawn,
charming, and often moving, yet in many
ways it lacks the depth that would elicit
higher praise.
Rita D. Jacobs
New York CityKatherena Vermette
River WomanToronto. House of Anansi
Press. 2018. 112 pages.River Woman—profound-
ly personal, politically
charged, playful and burn-
ing with love and loss—is
a brilliant poetic work by
Governor General’s award-104 W LT SUMMER 2019