Fairy Ring

by Martine Desjardins

It's the dog days of summer in 1895. Freud's uncorked his essay on hysteria and female sexuality. Clara Weiss, submissive and anti-heroic, is stranded with her new husband, Edmond , in a Nova Scotia house rented from Captain Ian Ryder, who soon leaves to explore the Arctic .

Edmond 's an acrid lout.

Time not devoured by his mushroom fetish is devoted to terrorizing Clara with raw meat, sensory deprivation, free-flowing morphine, and ritual defilement. She and Ryder, meanwhile, pine for the illusory redemption they each glimpsed in their short meeting, but they are merely two ships that passed on her wedding night.

Martine Desjardins's Fairy Ring is loveless, bitter, and fraught with bodily desecration. It's also lyrical and lucid, wildly inspired, and hilarious.

Fred A. Reed and David Homel have convincingly translated Desjardins's 1997 debut novel, Le cercle de Clara , from French into the most pristine and august Victorian English.

Hyper-proper syntax and elocution detail the minutiae of abundant depravity within bent social circles. In the words of an officious letter from the irreproachable Dr. Clavel, which medically justifies Clara's ceaseless outpatient treatments, "The female reproductive system is cold because it is not seminal in nature. If it becomes heated, the woman's entire psychic equilibrium is affected.... Hence the necessity of employing the appropriate antithermal therapy to lower the temperature of the organism."

Ryder's logbook entries, Clara's effluvial diary entries, and assorted correspondences among her hub of vacuous cronies and contentious family move the narrative along.

But, as Clara boasts, there's no factual surety to be had: "Should anyone seek to learn anything about me, it is certainly not to be found in these pages," which are a "buzzing hive of lies, errors and dissimulation."

Nevertheless, Desjardins keeps Fairy Ring on a brisk and potent course, meandering without derailing.

-- sigcino moyo

original publication: Amazon.ca