\s mYevtew KALEIDOSCOPE - University of British Columbia

BOOKS IN REVIEWsuggestive of that strategy: "The windblows where it wills, and you hear thesound of it, but you do not know whenceit comes or whither it goes; so it is withevery one who is born to the Spirit."Set in the early 1930's, Crache à Picchronicles a set of interdictions and enactsa way of responding to these. Prohibitionand its analogues, the Deportationand the Expulsion from Eden, providethe focal points in Maillet's continuedhistory of an intrepid people's deprivation.Comment vivre hors du paradisaprès la chute? — that is the englobingquestion. And it is one especially poignantfor those with a lively memory of adiaspora. The answer Maillet's fictionseems to proffer is bafflingly simple, amatter of common sense; nourished onthe past, feed off present adversity. Suchstrategic counsel at once governs the lifeof her protagonist and generates the artwhich gives that life.The heroine of the tale is the last inthat line of titanic thaumaturges, theCrache à Pic. At 27, the long-leggedcommander of the schooner La Vachemarine has taken it for her task to setright the injustices worked by les grandson les petits. The capitalist/bootleggerDieudonné, a diminished Acadian AlCapone, is her immediate antagonist.Though an able gamester himself — likeCrache à Pic, he has learned "à tirerprofit des contrariétés" — Dieudonné isno match for the more cunning defenderof the oppressed: "à rusé, rusé et demi."Her daring coups de théâtre at sea andon land thwart his every strategem. Disguisecounters disguise, counterfeit cancelscounterfeit, code baffles code. Goliathis defeated with his own weapons, as itwere. "Une joueuse de tours," Crache àPic figures that imaginative race whichuses its inheritance to mystify the ignorantand those not so gifted for improvisation.If a Fredericton civil servantcannot distinguish a Robidoux from aRobichaud, a Comeau from a Cormier,if a parish priest cannot make out themoonshine behind the bricks, if federalagents cannot discriminate between theTatamagouche and the Mistouche, theMadagouiac and the Kouchibougouac, ifcustoms officers cannot tell genuine fromfalse priests or rubbing alcohol fromwhisky, and if a translator and a judgeare set aspin by a tour de force of logicand language, so much the better: thereis cover and power in mystery and mystification.When entered into with an unflinchingfaith in the self, in the wondrouspowers passed from generation togeneration, the game of illusion andreality rewards the skilful player withlaughter and continued life. "Seules survécurentles bêtes les plus rusées."It goes without saying that where inventivenessconfers power, the maker andteller of stories is king. And nothing lessthan the world's (re) creation is the missionof Crache à Pic. Even the Land ofCockaigne is possible to the fabulist whofashions in the spirit of Albert the Great(not the teacher of Aquinas here, but thesorcerer of the Liber de Alchima). "Unconteur en ce pays est plus qu'un rapporteurde menteries." As Maillet imaginesthe adventurous life of Crache à Pic,passing from Old Clovis to the narrator'sfather to the narrator to the reader ofCrache à Pic, the very distortions or liesattendant on that transmission serve asfurther confirmation of the imagination'sdominion as a life-giving power. Tellinglies and rebuilding the world are coincidententerprises.But there is a dark side to this celebrationof shrewd inventiveness or prevarication."Plus on a faim, plus on tape dupied"; or, as Montaigne once remarked,the more the disorientation, more thewriting. As in the Abbey of Thélème,singing, dancing, and storytelling inCrache à Pic testify to a crying hunger.Suffering and death may inspire a people170