Product Description

Alone with their authoritarian father on a vast estate where time has stopped, two siblings speak a language and inhabit a surreal universe of their own making, shaped by their reading of philosophy and tales of chivalry. When their father dies and the children set out to bury him, they encounter the inhabitants of the neighboring village, and the pair's cloak of romance and superstition falls away to reveal the appalling truth of their existence. A brilliant, masterful story in which nothing is as it first seems, The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches is a triumph of suspense, linguistic invention, and playfulness that peers into the heart of guilt, cruelty, and violence.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #123846 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-19
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .39" h x 5.32" w x 8.17" l, .39 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 152 pages

Amazon.ca Canadian Essential
Anglophone Canadians are very good at ignoring the literature of their francophone neighbours. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the novels of Gaétan Soucy. Stunningly written, morally sophisticated, and conceived with an often brutal savagery, Soucy's novels rank with the world's best contemporary fiction. The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, a violent and glorious fable, is the best place to begin reading the work of this exceptional writer.

Amazon.ca
The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches is a grisly, seductive little terror of a novel, an entrancing blend of philosophical investigation, gallows humour, and enigma-driven suspense. Gaétan Soucy works in the tradition of Beckett, Sartre, Camus, and even Kafka, but he is quite able to stake out his existential explorations in new and uncharted territory, all while--and this is perhaps his most surprising feat--creating a novel that is something of a best-selling page-turner.

Soucy's narrator is an unforgettable adolescent, unsure of his or her own gender, raised by a tyrannical, epileptic father on a crumbling rural estate, with only a younger brother for company. The narrator (who has a name, but to reveal it would be to give too much away) and the brother have a rich private dialect and a tradition of private ritual which they take for granted, but which has little to do with the outside world. When the father hangs himself, Soucy's narrator sets out for the terra incognito of the neighbouring village in an attempt to find a coffin, or "pine suit," and the self-contained society of the family estate begins to implode. Sheila Fischman's translation of Soucy's playful naïf style, unlike so much translated fiction, has a unique and wonderful texture. The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches is marvellous, and Soucy is a writer from whom we can expect great things. --Jack Illingworth

From Publishers Weekly
When it appeared in 1998, Soucy's work received critical raves and was the first novel published in Quebec ever to be nominated for France's celebrated Prix Renaudot. Magic realist in tone, the novel chronicles the story of two brothers who grow up isolated from and largely ignorant of the world outside their father's massive estate, save for information gleaned from books and fairy tales. After their father dies, the boys must confront their surroundings, both familiar and unfamiliar; encounters with the inhabitants of the neighboring village rapidly and cruelly strip away their innocence. Occasionally, Soucy's colorful prose captivates, but more frequently the convoluted nature of the narrative befuddles and keeps the reader from following the course of events. A good deal of the writing is stilted and perplexing, as the narrator's frame of reference consists mainly of imagined objects and perspectives born solely of books, and therefore (understandably) divorced from reality. To be sure, such a style reflects Soucy's creativity and inventiveness, and his writing abounds with expressive flights of fancy. Unfortunately, the cumulative effect is to keep the reader at arm's length, and to weaken the force of Soucy's innovative storytelling.

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