DAYS OF SAND
By Hélène Dorion
Translated by Jonathan Kaplansky
Cormorant, 120 pages, $22.95
MERCURY UNDER MY TONGUE
By Sylvain Trudel
Translated by Sheila Fischman
Soft Skull, 160 pages, $15.50
In Grade 8, I asked my science teacher, "When a person has a seizure, could it be that they're just expressing something from deep within the Earth, rather than having a medical problem?" An odd question, but one that would probably make sense to Fréderic and Hélène, narrators, respectively, of Mercury Under My Tongue, by Sylvain Trudel, and Days of Sand, by Hélène Dorion. In very different ways, both try to come to grips with life, death and illness - just a few of those earth-shaking unknowns existence sends our way.
Death, near-drownings, houses burning, the moment one realizes the separation between self and others, or even tonsillitis - these pivotal, inexplicable events in Days of Sand brand the narrator for life. "For fear attacks the body at the same time as illness. Never again do we find the gentle forgetting, the serene innocence of having a body - at any moment, it reminds us that we never possess it..."
At school, young Helen in Days of Sand finds not answers, but a measure of control. "My father dropped my sister and me off at school, and as soon as the door closed, the Earth stopped shaking me." At school, she is taught to read, something she saw her father do incessantly. Hélène senses that reading was is the answer to escaping into a place that makes sense of the unknown.
In Hélène's home, the windows are so transparent birds fly into them and die. Wanting to believe in God, she prays that when she looks again, they will have flown away. More often than not, they're still dead. "So God did not exist. Nor did meaning."
Later, reading transforms into writing, giving Hélène more mastery over her search; meaning becomes a solo act of creation.
A lack of belief characterizes Fréderic Langlois's story in Mercury Under My Tongue, too, but where Dorion's book is poetic and expressive, Fréderic's first-person narrative reads like a high-speed train barrelling toward a head-on collision with a mountainside. Trudel, recipient of a 2007 Governor-General's literary award, creates a character filled with the anger and energy of one who refuses to go gently - which is completely understandable when it comes from a 16-year-old virgin dying of bone cancer.
"When I woke up in the recovery room where everything is bathed in fluorescent light and moaning, the man seemed quite sorry to tell me that my hipbone is a sheet of paper; if you stood a candle behind it you would see the flame through the bone and it would have a bleak and terrible beauty."
Such bare and honest writing is hard to take, but Fréderic is relentless in pursuing truth. Having rejected his Catholicism, he refuses last sacraments and even causes the resident shrink some concern when he christens himself "Metastasio," after an 18th-century Italian poet.
Sprinkled throughout Mercury are Fréderic's poems, which try to capture the essence of his fleeting moments, the last days of his life in hospital, where he forges ephemeral friendships with other patients, some of whom he forgives for being healed.
While no words take away Fréderic's pain, he nonetheless pursues his life with words, just as Hélène does in Days of Sand. The difference is that the latter is imbued with the security of one who has been healed. Dorion is winner of the Prix Anne-Hébert and is a highly regarded Quebec poet, and her images are soothing and comforting even while they probe the frightening unanswerables of life. There is a luxuriousness in her prose that is missing in Trudel's, because Fréderic knows he is doomed, while Dorion is the survivor.
At the beginning of Mercury Under My Tongue, Fréderic muses that he will die a man "without qualities, without richness." That may be true, but in creating Fréderic, Trudel lends a richness to all those Fréderics we will never hear of. If Dorion is what we read now, from the vantage point of survival, perhaps Trudel will be what we read just before the Earth seizes us one last time.
Elizabeth Johnston's No Small Potatoes will be out this fall.