White Out
Martine Delvaux
Katia Grubisic
September 2018
WHITE OUT is at first glance a woman’s invention, over and over again, of the man who chose not to be her father, leaving his young lover pregnant. Yet, arcing from late-1960s Quebec to the present, it is also the story of a young woman, and a generation of young women, caught between Catholicism and free love. Martine Delvaux’s aching take on her own origin story is a book about words lost in a lifetime of storms, about truth and fiction, a book about how something as seemingly commonplace as parentage can undermine everything—confidence, relationships, the body, memory. Through narrative we try to patch our unknowns but narrative, at once foreign and familiar, fails us.
MARTINE DELVAUX was born in Quebec City and lives in Montreal. After Bitter Rose and The Last Bullet Is For You, White Out is the third of her five novels published in English translation by LLP. Delvaux teaches women’s studies at Université du Québec à Montréal. Blanc dehors, the original French novel now translated into English as White Out, was shortlisted for a 2016 Governor General’s Award for fiction.
KATIA GRUBISIC is a writer, editor, and translator. She was coordinator of the Atwater Poetry Project reading series, and was a founding member of the editorial board for the Icehouse Poetry imprint at Goose Lane Editions. Her own work has appeared in various Canadian and international publications. She has been a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for translation, and her collection of poems What if red ran out won the Gerald Lampert award for best first book. Her translation of A Cemetery for Bees was a finalist for the Governor General Literary Awards in 2021.
$16.95 | ISBN: 9781773900018