Book Description
This is the story of Édouard, Stéphane, and the spirited girl they find alone and apparently lost in Paris. When the two men offer the young Quebec girl shelter for the night, their lives are profoundly and irrevocably changed. Stéphane falls quickly for Delphine, but Édouard, a man without expectations who hides from the world in a life of mediocrity and whose only desire is to live and die quietly, is slower to accept her. He is disturbed by Delphine's abrupt arrival in his life, her strange accent, her excessive passion. Then, just as he opens himself to her exuberance and vulnerability, he is torn violently from her and left to unravel the mysteries of her sudden presence and absence. Anne Hébert's fifth novel in translation (originally published under the title Est-ce que je te dérange?) springs from a place between dream and reality, and offers a disturbing look into the workings of fascination and obsession. Tortured love, broken childhoods, and the forces of nature and death are woven into this extraordinary, poetic tale from one of Canada's most important writers.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

Anne Hébert (August 1, 1916 - January 22, 2000) was a Canadian author and poet.

French-Canadian novelist, poet, playwright, and short-story writer, noted for her examination of the lives of the Quebeçois. Hébert combined realism and symbolism, and reworked the tradition of the historical novel. In her poems Hébert used free verse with dense, almost surrealistic images. Her novels show influence of the French nouveau roman and postmodern narrative techniques.

Elle règne sur un peuple de tournesols amers
Agités par le vent des terrains vagues
Tandis qu'au loin la ville fumante
Se retourne sur son aire
Et rajuste les chaînes aux chevilles des esclaves.
(from 'Soleil dérisoire')

Anne Hébert was born in Sainte-Catherine-de-Fossambault, about 25 miles (40 kilometers) from Québec city. She started to write poetry in her teens under the tutelage of her father, Maurice-Lang Hébert (1888-1960), a provincial civil servant and a distinguished literary critic. Another crucial person in Hébert's life was her cousin, Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (1912-43), a poet, who died of a heart attack at the age of 31.

Hébert attended Collège Saint-Coeur de Marie, Merici, Quebec, and Collège Notre Dame, Bellevue, Quebec. In the 1940s, Hébert was briefly affiliated with the newly established government film bureau. Hébert worked for Radio Canada (1950-53), and the National Film Board of Canada (1953-54, 1959-60). In the mid-1950s, she moved to Paris, the location of many of his stories, but made frequent visits to Canada. In her voluntary exile, Hébert often dealt with the themes of isolation, alienation, and repressive nature of small communities.

Hébert's first collection of poems, Les Songes en Éguilabre, appeared in 1942. Its romantic tone was far from the violent images of her next book, Le Torrent (1950, The Torrent), a collection of short stories. In Le Tombeau des Rois (1953), her second book of poetry, Hébert explored her anguish, the stifling responsibilities of maturity, and repression and revolt. Poèmes (1960) earned her the Governor General's Literary Award.

Fantastic elements were present already in Hébert's first novel, Les Chambres de bois (1958, The Silent Rooms), and continued to appear in her subsequent works, such as in Héloïse (1980), in which the title character, Héloïse, belongs to a community of vampires that dwells among abandoned Parisian subway stations and sucks the blood of Métro passengers. Open to many intepretions, in this Hébert's work the vampire can be understood as a metaphor for hidden otherness.

Les Chambres de bois was about a woman whose husband has a horror of sex. The heroine, Catherine, revolts against the marital prison, and breaks out of the rooms of the title. Kamouraska (1970), which began the cycle set in the 19th-century Quebec, was based on historical murder case and stories Hébert's mother had told her. The central character is woman who conspires with her lover to murder her husband. Hébert's narrative changes from first person to the third, she enters the mind of Elisabeth, and reveals her revolt behind her submissive appearence. Hébert co-wrote with the director Claude Jutka the screenplay for Kamouraska's film version (1973), starring Geneviève Bujold.

Les Enfants du Sabbat (1975, Children of the Black Sabbath), set in a Quebec convent, was a tale of witchcraft, incest, and intercourse with the devil. Julie, the protagonist, is dedicated to sorcery and lives out a perverse version of the virgin birth. The novel was poortly received in Quebec, but it won the Governor General's Literary Award. Les fous de Bassan (1982, In the Shadow of the Wind) depicted people in an English-speaking village in the Gaspé. Six narratives relate from different angles rape and murder of two cousins, Nora and Olivia Atkins. One of the narrator is their cousin Stevens Brown, the murderer. Nora also tells her story, and about her sexual awakening. "I know about boys. That sting in the middle of their bodies, while I, I am hollow and moist. Waiting." The sixth narrator is the spirit of Olivia. The book was a best seller in Canada and in France it was awarded the 1982 Prix Femina. "The power in this haunting book - a power that seems in no way diminished in translation - comes from the language, the rich, inventive images, the heated, melodious prose. The winds Anne Hebert stirs up in her readers' minds do not die down until long after the book has been closed." (C. B. Bryan in The New York Times, July 22, 1984)

In the late 1990s, Hébert returned to Canada after learning she was terminally ill. She died of bone cancer on January 22, 2000, in Montreal, Quebec. Hébert never married and had no children. Her final novel, Un Habit de lumière, appeared in 1998.