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: #208840 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-19
• Original language: English
• 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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Customer Reviews

Rememoried realities
What an extraordinary story Gaetan Soucy has created with this novel! The brevity of the text doesn't diminish its impact. I came across it by chance, highly recommended by a friend. Once started, it turned out to be almost impossible to put down. After the last page of this peculiar "last will and testament" of the young protagonist the emotions lingered on. Frequently addressing the reader directly, he explains why this confession was written at all, and in haste, why there was "no possibility to reread" what was written earlier. The narrative talks about secrets and strange happenings, cross-references to points and events to be elucidated later and explaining uncommon terms. "It's a pretty word, rememory, I don't know if it actually exists, but it means to recall things." Distance is measured in "legs", time in "moons" and the watch used by the brother has no hands.

Two siblings, brothers for all they know, live with their domineering father on a large isolated estate "beyond the pine grove". They are forbidden any contact with the outside world. They see nobody other than five neighbours who appear from time to time to meet with their father. The two have created their own world - somewhere between reality and fantasy. Their only toy is a frog which they captured and feed with dead flies. Their education is founded on "dictionaries" held in the vast library: biblical texts, Spinoza and other classics. The narrator is the "secretarious" whose responsibility is to record everything that is happening. The language they have learned reflects their readings. Their interpretation of concepts is based on what they have been able to grasp from the dictionaries and the father's instructions. The father, a priest at a young age, has his own reasons for the strict discipline extending to himself as well as to his offspring. The story begins with the siblings finding the father dead one morning. One of the two has to gather the courage to venture to the nearby village to get a "grave box". The exposure to the outside world is a complete shock and results in a series of dramatic events that will overwhelm the young people's lives forever.

It is difficult to describe the suspense that Soucy is creating with the use of weird language and the often surreal imagery of the protagonist. We learn about the woodshed named the "vault" and the "Fair Punishment" that is living there... The portrait gallery and the "ball room" carry their own memories, reflected through murmurs of past splendour and laughter or through images visible in the broken, milky mirrors lining the wall. While the mystery thickens around the siblings as the reader gets drawn into the story, it unravels in bits and pieces continuously at the same time. Clues are dropped and hints provided that enable putting together the bizarre and otherworldly life story of this odd family. A very unusual book that has won deserved praise in Quebec, France and around the world in its English translation. [Friederike Knabe]

3½ stars for an unusual book
After the death of the father one of his children travels to a neighbouring town to buy a coffin: in this book the child describes the events during the first few days after the father has died. The children were raised by the father in cruel circumstances and virtually without contact with the outside world. Slowly but surely it becomes apparent that horror events have taken and are still taking place in the house. The language used in the book is very special as it is an odd mixture of outdated and harsh words. The child has been raised with the language of the father plus a library full of old fashioned books of which Spinoza, the bible and the memories of the Duc de Saint-Simon were the most important ones. This unusual language makes the book very special, but the story line was in my opinion rather thin, so 3½ stars.

AN ASTONISHING ACHIEVEMENT
I found this wonderful book by chance in a local bookstore -- and what a discovery! I have read reviews and commentaries about this novel that compare Soucy's literary style to that of noted Italian master Italo Calvino -- and while I think the comparison is an apt one, it is certainly not an indication that Soucy is derivative in any way. This is a refreshingly original work, and one that is a joy -- as well as a challenge -- to experience.

Written in the form of a hurriedly-composed memoir, yet incredibly rich in its language and imagery, this novel slowly and masterfully lays bare the beautiful but horrifying existence two siblings experience on a large estate in the countryside, raised there in isolation by their authoritarian father. They are not sent to school -- there is no television and no radio, and no contact with the nearby village. Neighbors are few, and are only seen on rare occasions, at a distance. The estate is occasionally visited by a one-legged beggar -- one of the few people the father seems to welcome into their company. Any other visitors are kept at a distance from the children, dealt with by the father in tete-a-tetes in the fields, far out of earshot. The children's only knowledge of the outside world comes from the seemingly thousands of books in the estate's library.

The narrator of the story -- one of the two siblings -- refers to the books as 'disctionaries'. There are classic tales of chivalry and adventure to be found there, as well as texts on philosophy -- Spinoza is mentioned quite often. The reference to these books as 'distionaries' is an important and telling revelation about the way the children perceive the world -- left to their own devices and imaginations, their view inevitably is a skewed one, and the amazing construction of language they use, and with which Soucy tells this tale, is a wonder to behold.

The language sometimes gets a little cumbersome and confusing -- but that, again, is a symptom of the lives led by these children, and, I believe, an effective conveyance of their situation and outlook to the mind of the reader. It makes for a sometimes slow read -- but it's a very rewarding one. The story itself peels away rather like the layers of an onion -- as it progresses, the reader (as well as the narrator), comes closer and closer to the heart, to the truth, of the matter. The journey is filled with scenes of breathtaking description, of beauty and horror, of rapturous joy as well as despair. There is a timeless quality to the story itself -- there are few details that reveal the setting, either in place or in time. It is only toward the end of the book that we begin to get a feel for approximately when this story might have taken place.

Soucy's workings here are deft and masterful -- the book is crafted like a precious stone being cut by a lapidary genius. Without having read his other novel, THE ATONEMENT (which I plan to do, and soon), I would rank this work right up alongside the creations of the aforementioned Mr. Calvino, as well as the works of Jorge Luis Borges, Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Again, let me emphasize -- I found Soucy's highly original and in no way derivative. I place him in the company of these other authors only to give the potential reader an idea of the magnitude of his talent.

A note on the translation work involved: given the language employed by Soucy, I can only applaud the work of Sheila Fischman, who translated this novel from the original French. The wordplay, the puns, and the alliteration must have presented a monumental task. Without having read the original French version, I can only imagine what a formidable task this must have been. She also translated THE ATONEMENT -- which makes me look forward to reading it even more.

THE LITTLE GIRL WHO WAS TOO FOND OF MATCHES is a relatively short book -- at 138 pages -- but the intelligence, imagination and sheer creativity that are at work within it give it a body that belies the size of this slim volume. I'm sure that I will return to it again and again -- and that I will find even more jewels within it with each exploration.