- 'Le Livre et la Dent' by Pierrette Fleutiaux
This short story is about a mother who is under huge strain, perhaps due to overwork and exhaustion, who looks forward to her night-time ritual of reading when she gets time to herself. Her child is slow to settle down to sleep, however, and needs her to find his or her lost tooth to place under the pillow. While helping the child, she experiences a kind of waking dream where she imagines the collapse of the building and she takes on the arduous task of rebuilding it by herself.
This story was an interesting read as it takes a turn into the surreal very quickly. Finding the tooth becomes the sole focus and as the woman pursues it, she seems to lose her grip on reality, as the building deteriorates around her and she falls into a deep black hole.
She rises up from the rubble. A crowd draws around her from the other apartments. There is total devastation but the tooth is still within her view. The woman has already hurt her hand from prising a floorboard, but now we are informed, rather casually, that the axe that she had borrowed is now embedded in her head. She continues on, in spite of the headache.
The woman encounters several characters while she rebuilds the apartment block. They are in general, not helpful to her in her quest. They have issues in one way or other with teeth, toothache, no teeth, or they try and tempt her to leave the scene or distract her with other ideas.
The character of the mason is helpful. He commits himself to her project. In fact, he is overly helpful and pulls out his own tooth for her, removing half of his jaw in the process. This is an example of the violent, grotesque imagery that is interwoven into this story.
After much toil, tears and trouble, the woman eventually succeeds in finding the tooth and places it under her child's pillow. We get the impression that things are back to normal, except that the child has bruises. The woman finds that she can't settle down to her book. The mason with the broken jaw returns to ask her to change his bandage. She is still experiencing the waking dream. It isn't over. The woman lies down but in fear that she will relive the dream all over again.
This was a strange, unsettling story. The reader wasn't sure about what might happen next as the story took its various twists and turns. I thought it was well written and succeeded in evoking the panic and claustrophobic qualities of a nightmare and the absurdity that one experiences often in dreams. It reminded me of the times when I had broken sleep due to night-time feeds when I had babies. Overall, it was an interesting read and very different to the other short stories that we have read so far.
From a language point of view, I liked the line, 'Tout craque, grince, culbute, cogne, s'entrecroise et s'entrechoque, s'écrase, s'empile et s'entasse' to describe the collapse of the building. An impressive list of verbs indeed :)