A novel of sinister beauty that amazes and torments in equal measure

The DIEC says that the mascarell is a "sea bird of the sulid family, about 90 centimeters long, with white plumage and a black spot around its eyes" that has the peculiarity of diving into the sea like crazy. In the Catalan-Valencià-Balear Dictionary Another meaning of the word is added: "Masked, stained with mask." This is also the title of the Catalan translation of the thriller psychological work written by the Quebec author, playwright and poet Anne Hébert (1916-2000), a work that in 1983 won the Femina Prize and the Governor of Central Canada Award, among others, and which, in French, is titled The fous of Bassan.

The story tells of the disappearance of two sexually thriving teenagers, Nora and Olivia Atkins, pretty cousins, in a town sick with its rules. A month later, the sea washes up on the shore the two young women's bodies. However, what interests Hébert is not the typical police motive, nor even the culprit, but the diversified point of view of the narrators, who, in an interior monologue narrated according to the register of each character, tell the story in retrospect, in each of the book's six sections. They are characters with very defined and perverse identities that generate all kinds of reactions in the reader. The discordant voice of young Percival, the town madman, who is ultimately the most coherent of all, stands out. And in a no less important background is the description of the setting, a wild, windy territory, with fleeting landscapes and suffocating atmospheres, with high waves and cliffs, in northern Canada, filled with cruelty and incest (everyone has blue eyes), in a fallacy.

All of this at the service of a language somewhere between postmodern and poetic (very well translated by Antoni Clapés) that gives rise to a fragmentary style, of ellipses and small scenes linked together to form an overall atmosphere. The sea and nature are two of the strong points of the small community in the coastal town of Griffin Creek, made up of families of English descent who have isolated themselves in a predominantly French-speaking territory of Quebec dominated by a fear of hunger, all of them attached to very rigid and castrating religious beliefs that are part of life. For some time now, the roles of the toxic male and the submissive, "placated and tamed" woman.

Sordidity and a rich language

The emergence of sexuality (always latent) in this context—the arrival of Stevens Brown, the two girls' attractive cousin—unsettles the closed, often blood-related community in the heat of 1936, specifically on August 31st. The newcomer raises alarm among the male inhabitants of Griffin Creek and a repressed desire in many of the village's cloistered women, who are now willing to cross boundaries to follow the base instincts that, deep down, dominate them. It's a strange book, at times unpleasant and disturbing—let's not fool ourselves, because the sordidness and darkness with which the author imbues human relationships are uncomfortable but, precisely for that reason, artistically necessary. The author's exquisite and rich language makes up for what is explained to us. But one thing is clear: Anne Hébert's young girls are objects of desire and a prize for men, while the older ones are a source of repulsion. And all of them, of course, are containers of sexist violence. The denunciation of a repugnantly unequal society is one of the strengths ofThe gannets.

As for the investigation (which remains in the background but is also there), it is always surrounded by mystery, but at the end of the work the reader comes to know who the murderer is when he already has a lump in his throat. As in any good crime novel, no one is free of guilt. The lyrical tale of evil, in Hébert's hands, transforms into a fable indebted toThe Sound and the Fury (1929) by William Faulkner, which adds the young Stevens's heart-wrenching letters that open and close the heart of narrative voices, mixed with references to popular children's books, the poetry of Rimbaud or literal quotes from the Bible. In short, this is a book of sinister beauty that amazes and torments in equal measure.