CANR
WORK TITLE: THE BODY OF THE BEASTS
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://audreewilhelmy.com/2014/
CITY: Montreal
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COUNTRY: Canada
NATIONALITY: Canadian
LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1985, in Cap Rouge, Quebec, Canada.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer.
AWARDS:Sade Award (France); Governor-General’s Literary Award (finalist).
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Audrée Wilhelmy is a Canadian writer. She has released novels in French, including Oss, Les sands, and Le corps des bêtes.
In 2019, The Body of the Beasts, an English translation of Le corps des bêtes, was released. It focuses on two members of the Borya family, Osip and Sevastian-Benedikt. They have lived with their family in a remote lighthouse since they were young. Eventually, they are the only family members left there. Sevastian has a longtime relationship with a mysterious woman named Noe, and they have multiple children together. Osip also falls for Noe and begins having an affair with her. Meanwhile, one of Sevastian and Noe’s children, twelve-year-old Mie, becomes obsessed with sex.
In an interview with Ian McGillis, contributor to the Montreal Gazette website, Wilhelmy commented on the relationship between the two brothers. She stated: “What interested me in writing about that relationship is that Osip really cares, but Sevastian-Benedikt doesn’t seem to. … It’s hard when you feel you’re in a competition but that you’re alone in that competition, and you’re losing it.” Regarding the book’s open ending, Wilhelmy told McGillis: “I wanted to let the reader choose. … I don’t care if the interpretation isn’t the same for everyone. That’s actually what I want. I see reading as a creative act just as much as writing is. Take the book and make it your own.”
A critic in Kirkus Reviews offered a mixed assessment of The Body of the Beasts. Referring to Wilhelmy, the critic asserted: “She is a meticulous recorder of the dramatic wilderness of what seems to be coastal Quebec.” However, the critic added: “Wilhelmy’s detached look at incest and child sexuality may leave many readers cold.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2019, review of The Body of the Beasts.
ONLINE
Audrée Wilhelmy, http://audreewilhelmy.com/ (August 15, 2019).
Montreal Gazette, https://montrealgazette.com/ (August 1, 2019), Ian McGillis, author interview.
In French.
AUDRÉE WILHELMY was born in 1985 in Cap Rouge, Quebec and now lives in Montreal. She is the winner of France’s Sade Award, has been a finalist for the Governor-General’s Literary Award, and was shortlisted for the Prix France-Québec and the Quebec Booksellers Award. The Body of the Beasts is her third novel and the first to be translated into English.
QUOTED: "What interested me in writing about that relationship is that Osip really cares, but Sevastian-Benedikt doesn’t seem to. ... It’s hard when you feel you’re in a competition but that you’re alone in that competition, and you’re losing it."
"I wanted to let the reader choose. ... I don’t care if the interpretation isn’t the same for everyone. That’s actually what I want. I see reading as a creative act just as much as writing is. Take the book and make it your own."
Books: The masterful ambiguity of Audrée Wilhelmy's The Body of the Beasts
The setting of the Quebecer's taboo-busting novel could be primitive or post-apocalyptic, and such compelling uncertainty runs all through the book.
Ian McGillis Updated: August 1, 2019
Audrée Wilhelmy welcomes different interpretations of The Body of the Beasts, her first novel to be translated into English. “I see reading as a creative act just as much as writing is. Take the book and make it your own.” Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette
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Most of us are familiar with Tolstoy’s dictum about families. To paraphrase: the happy ones are all the same, while the unhappy ones are all unhappy in unique ways. But Tolstoy never reckoned with the Boryas.
The Body of the Beasts (Arachnide, 185 pages, $22.95), Audrée Wilhelmy’s third novel and her first to be translated into English, centres on a clan of uncertain origins living on a wild, isolated shore in an unnamed country at an unspecified time. Noé is as uncommon a matriarch as you could hope to meet: given to long periods of silence, evincing a stronger bond with her natural surroundings than with her husband, children and in-laws. As for her spouse, Sevastian-Benedikt finds himself in competition with his younger brother Osip, who openly covets Noé. Then there is Noé and Sevastian-Benedikt’s daughter Mie, whose intense childhood speculation on the mating rituals of animals is lately being transferred to those of people, and finding a focus in the reluctant Osip. Not surprisingly, some dark sexual undercurrents manifest themselves, and in ways some readers may find unsettling.
The novel’s rough premise — a small community left to its own devices, constructing its own code of conduct as the situation demands it — may well call to mind William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, or on a more prosaic level Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden. But you needn’t get far into the book (originally published as Le Corps des bêtes) to conclude that such comparisons are ultimately irrelevant. The Body of the Beasts is very much its own beast.
Wilhelmy (the family name is traceable to a group of German soldiers who were imported to fight in the War of 1812 and ended up staying) grew up in Cap-Rouge, a community that — bucolic name notwithstanding — is a Quebec City suburb that has since been incorporated into the city proper. Her father is a mineralogist, her mother a housewife and later a CEGEP design professor.
“It was a very easy childhood, in a very happy, loving family,” said the 33-year-old, quickly laying to rest any questions about her work’s possible autobiographical elements. “I went to a private girls’ school. Yes, it was Catholic, but as girls we were taught that we could do anything we wanted in life. I sometimes talk to other woman writers who say they were very self-conscious about their right to write. That was never in my mind at all.”
Early inspiration came from one of the giants of Quebec letters.
“When I was 15 or 16 and read Anne Hébert at school, it was a big permission to go much further in what I wanted to explore. She was very daring, making the ugly beautiful.”
Hébert has a worthy heir. Finding beauty in unexpected places, be they natural settings or seldom-explored corners of human behaviour, is something Wilhelmy does as well as any young writer in any language.
The flora and fauna described in The Body of the Beasts aren’t inconsistent with the shores of the St. Lawrence River, but as Wilhelmy pointed out, we could just as easily be in Ireland, Scotland or any number of other places. Similarly, the lack of obvious pointers to modernity — no radio, no television, no Wi-Fi, though a train does appear at one point, and a lighthouse figures prominently — means the action could be happening at any point from, say, the mid-19th century to the present.
“Some (readers) think it’s a primitive world, and some think it’s post-apocalyptic,” said Wilhelmy. “It could be either. I don’t really care.”
Audrée Wilhelmy cites Quebec literary giant Anne Hébert as an early inspiration. “She was very daring, making the ugly beautiful.” Allen McInnis / Montreal Gazette
Equally elusive is young Mie’s ability to inhabit the consciousness of animals and inanimate objects. Are readers to picture series of literal metamorphoses, or is this all happening inside Mie’s head, a variation on an age-old childhood coping mechanism? Such uncertainty runs all through the novel, and on multiple levels. Far from a shortcoming, though, it’s a key to the book’s considerable power.
Among the most compelling of the novel’s many interpersonal permutations is the rivalry between Osip and Sevastian-Benedikt, and the triangle they form with Noé. That it doesn’t unfold with the fireworks you might expect is just one of the ways in which Wilhelmy defies and subverts expectation; her deft portrayals of young men are all the more notable for her having grown up with three sisters and no brothers.
“What interested me in writing about that relationship is that Osip really cares, but Sevastian-Benedikt doesn’t seem to,” she said. “It’s hard when you feel you’re in a competition but that you’re alone in that competition, and you’re losing it.”
As for the potentially explosive Osip/Mie plot strand, it is resolved with a masterfully executed ambiguity.
“I wanted to let the reader choose,” Wilhelmy said of her open-ended ending. “I don’t care if the interpretation isn’t the same for everyone. That’s actually what I want. I see reading as a creative act just as much as writing is. Take the book and make it your own.”
The latter command could indeed serve as a manifesto for Wilhelmy’s fictional world, a place where you may find yourself asking some of the big questions. What makes a family a family? What, if anything, distinguishes people from animals? The novel wears its philosophical and ethical inquiry lightly, aided by the carefully cultivated neutrality of its time and place.
“It’s much easier to consider taboo questions when you’re in a kind of once-upon-a-time. In a universe that was more anchored, the sexuality taboos would be much more problematic.”
This being a work in which language does a lot of the heavy lifting, Susan Ouriou’s rendering of Wilhelmy’s musical prose into English deserves a special commendation. And speaking of translation, the standard lag period means that Wilhelmy finds herself promoting her last book in English just as her next one is set for publication in French. The contrast isn’t as jarring as it could have been: through an intuitive process, Wilhelmy has been knitting her novels in such a way that, while standing on their own, they also form a loose unity.
“That’s a comforting thing for a writer,” she said. “You feel like you’re kind of slowly building a family, instead of having to recreate the world from nothing every time.”
Our conversation last week represented the first time Wilhelmy has been interviewed in English about her work, and despite claiming nervousness, she showed the confidence of someone well accustomed to the public aspect of being a writer. That includes something a lot of writers claim not to do: she’s an enthusiastic reader of her own reviews.
“For me, writing is a continuous learning process, so I find it really nourishing when there’s a criticism I can see the truth in,” she said. “But I’ve never had really harsh reviews, so I can’t really say how I would react to that.”
She may have to wait a while to find out.
ianmcgillis2@gmail.com
QUOTED: "She is a meticulous recorder of the dramatic wilderness of what seems to be coastal Quebec."
"Wilhelmy's detached look at incest and child sexuality may leave many readers cold."
Wilhelmy, Audree THE BODY OF THE BEASTS Arachnide/House of Anansi Press (Adult Fiction) $17.95 7, 30 ISBN: 978-1-4870-0610-5
A family in a remote lighthouse comes under the spell of an unusual woman and her even more unusual daughter.
The Borya brothers are young when the five of them, and their impoverished parents, move from their shack near a fishing village to take over an isolated lighthouse. Eventually, Osip, a middle brother, becomes the lighthouse keeper; Sevastian-Benedikt, the oldest, hunts and traps to keep them alive. As time passes and a tragedy reduces their number, Sevastian takes up with Noe, a strange woman who lives in a small cabin apart from the rest of the family. Though Noe is Sevastian's woman and bears him a number of children who run wild through the rugged landscape where they live, Osip is nevertheless obsessed with her, and the two begin sleeping together. Noe rarely speaks, and she has little to do with the children she births. She knows the land and the animals intimately: She can skin whales, handle jellyfish. Noe and Sevastian's daughter, Mie, has a similar talent, able to cast her mind into the bodies of other creatures (and sometimes inanimate objects) to fuse her consciousness with animals and explore the world. At 12, Mie now wants to understand humans better and turns her attention toward what seems most natural: sex. This is Wilhelmy's third novel, though the first to be translated into English, and she is a meticulous recorder of the dramatic wilderness of what seems to be coastal Quebec. But her desire to show readers how, left to their own devices, humans will behave in the amoral ways that nature produces in the animal kingdom seems to betray a deep cynicism. And Wilhelmy's detached look at incest and child sexuality may leave many readers cold.
Lovely writing wrapped around an often unpalatable core.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wilhelmy, Audree: THE BODY OF THE BEASTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2019. Gale General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A591279232/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5095dc29. Accessed 10 Aug. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A591279232