Querelle d'un squelette avec son double
Querelle d'un squelette avec son double is the sixth novel by the Chinese-Canadian author Ying Chen and was published in 2003 . The author wrote the novel in French. The title of the novel can be translated as 'a skeleton arguing with its doppelganger'.
content
action
The novel is about how two very different women enter into an inner dialogue in a mysterious way. The wife of an academic lives in an unidentified city, who is apparently almost disembodied and immortal. She spends most of the day in the couple's small house, preparing dinner with friends. In another part of the city, separated by a river from the woman's quarter in the house, an earthquake caused numerous houses to collapse. The second woman lies under the rubble of one of these houses. In the chapters, both women are discussed alternately, whereby it becomes clear that the two communicate with each other, although the circumstances actually do not allow this.
characters
The two main characters are the academic's wife and the buried woman, whose name is not given. It seems that the academic's wife has lived several lives or cannot die. Hardly anything can be learned about the identity of those buried. The husband, who is only named A., appears only marginally, and the child of the buried woman is also occasionally mentioned.
subjects
A central theme of the novel is the crossing of boundaries, for example the boundary between life and death, or the physical boundary between distant places.
Another theme of the novel is the issue of duplications and doppelgangers. One way of reading the novel is that the victim does not really exist, but is a hallucination of the woman who hears voices and whose mental health her husband seems to doubt.
It is also about the situation of women and the connection between identity and origin.
Narrative
Structure and shape
The text of the novel consists of numerous, unnumbered chapters, which are usually only a few pages long, and in which the two women alternate speaking as if in an inner monologue , but also enter into a dialogue with each other. The monologues of the woman in the house are always printed normally, while the monologues of the buried woman are in italics.
The dialogue between the two women is marked by a conflict: the woman in the house doesn't want the buried woman to speak to her, she feels disturbed by this voice in her head and reminds her of unpleasant things. The buried woman tries to get the woman in the house to help her and free her from the rubble of the collapsed house.
style
Éric Paquin emphasizes that Ying Chen's style in this novel no longer has the "simplicity and sobriety" for which she was known from her first novels, but that here she mainly plays with the "richness of meanings and ambiguity".
Robert Chartrand makes it clear that Querelle d'un squelette avec son double is not a realistic novel, but a novel in which the fantastic is combined with the everyday.
Background information
Origin context
The novel is the sixth novel by Ying Chen. She wrote it in Canada.
Classification in the overall work
The novel is the third of a tetralogy of novels in which a nameless woman is the main character and narrator, and on the Immobile (1998), Le champ dans la mer (2002), Querelle d'un squelette avec son double (2003) and Un enfant à ma porte (2008) belong.
The entire tetralogy is part of a clearly recognizable development in Ying Chen's oeuvre: In the first phase, the texts deal primarily with topics of intercultural experience. For example, the epistolary novel Les Lettres chinoises deals with the tension between traditional Chinese and modern Western cultures. In a comparable way, a novel like L'Ingratitude also thematizes the conflict between traditional Chinese culture and more modern aspirations for individuality, albeit without it being about an intercultural experience. In the second phase of Ying Chen's work, to which Querelle d'un squelette avec son double belongs, a detachment of "Chinese" or intercultural themes can be observed. The locations of the action are no longer clearly identifiable as Asian or Western, and the subjects dealt with have greater generality.
Reception and effect
The novel received extensive reviews in both France and Canada immediately after its publication. A German translation is not yet available.
Text output
- Querelle d'un squelette avec son double . Paris: Seuil, 1990. (Original edition)
literature
items
- Lorre, Christine. “Ying Chen's 'Poetic Rebellion'. Relocating the Dialogue, In Search of Narrative Renewal. " In Asian Canadian Writing Beyond Autoethnography , edited by Eleanor Ty and Christl Verduyn. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 2008, pp. 267-295.
Reviews
- Perrier, Philippe. "Critique: Querelle d'un squelette avec son double". In: L'Express / Lire , September 1, 2003 ( online ).
- Paquin, Eric. "Ying Chen - Madame et son fantôme". In: Voir.ca , May 29, 2003 ( online ).
- Chartrand, Robert. "Roman québécois - Ying Chen, une femme dans une ville". In: Le Devoir , 2003 ( online ).
Individual evidence
- ^ Éric Paquin, "Ying Chen - Madame et son fantôme". In: Voir.ca , May 29, 2003 (see reviews). He wrote in the original: "Avec un style dont on a surtout souligné par le passé la simplicité et la sobriété, la romancière, fascinée par la richesse du sens, par l'ambiguïté, se plaît à rappeler que chaque mot peut avoir une double signification . "
- ↑ Robert Chartrand. "Roman québécois - Ying Chen, une femme dans une ville". In: Le Devoir , 2003 (see reviews). He writes: “Ce roman de Ying Chen nous plonge donc dans le fantastique. Mais un fantastique qui s'érige sur fond de quotidienneté. "
- ↑ For the complete work, see the main article on Ying Chen and the sources cited there.