Guernica Editions

Maude is a strange, intense novella by Governor General's Award-winning writer/composer/musician Suzanne Jacob. It is a poetic psychodrama about Maude, an almost unimaginably unpractical artist, and Bruno, her barely pragmatic lover and business partner. In their shared house, Maude draws, while Bruno takes care of everything else, from doing her hair to selling her pictures and occasionally finding company to bring over. The same friends seldom visit twice, for the dynamics of Maude and Bruno's ménage are just too strange. Maude and Bruno live in a kind of floating stasis, but things begin to shift when an ephemeral attraction springs up between Maude and one of her guests, a café owner named Félix.

This is a slim book, but it is written in densely poetic prose, and Jacob's impressionistic narrative demands fervent attention from its readers. The strange syntax and sensuous appreciation of the world recall Hélène Cixous and other practitioners of écriture féminine. Anyone who demands stark realism will want to avoid Maude, but those who enjoy literature that revels in its own vagaries will relish this novella.