SOURCE; "Antonine Maillet's Eternal Return of the Acadian Character," in Quill & Quire, Vol. 52, No. 6, June, 1986, p. 37.

[In the review below, Homel praises The Devil is Loose, the English translation of Crache-à-pic.]

Beginning in 1755 an event occurred that the Acadians, with wry understatement, call le grand dérangement—"the big disruption"—their expulsion from their homeland in eastern Canada. Was the action directed from Britain, or was it a local initiative? Antonine Maillet, Acadia's best-known writer, is unsure which of the two versions is correct. But the themes of exile and return nourished her writing throughout her career as novelist and playwright. Two more of her novels were published in English translations last month: The Devil Is Loose by Lester & Orpen Dennys and Mariaagélas by Simon & Pierre. Though Mariaagélas was first published—in French—13 years before Devil, both books use the stuff of legend and oral tradition to express timeless Acadian themes.

Maillet lives on the avenue Antonine-Maillet in Montreal's Outremont district. Few writers in this country can boast of streets named on their behalf. "It was a product of circumstances," she explains. "Six or seven years ago there was a drive to find French names for some of the streets in this part of town. I had just won the Prix Goncourt, so some neighbor mentioned my name." Having your street named after you while you're still living on it may be partly an embarrassment and partly an honor; Maillet takes it mostly not as a personal triumph but as a blow struck for literature.

These triumphs and others—including a dozen honorary doctorates to add to the Ph.D. in literature she earned from Université Laval—have come to a writer from Bouctouche, New Brunswick, a town on the Northumberland Strait, facing Prince Edward Island. She attended school in Bouctouche and in the late 1940s became one of the first students at Collège Notre Dame d'Acadie in Moncton. Her schooling included reading both Racine and Shakespeare in the original, and today Maillet says that she largely learned to write through reading. She still has a residence in Bouctouche—fittingly, a lighthouse—where she spends the summers eating lobster, sailing, and writing.

Though her first novel was set in Acadia, it was not specifically Acadian in subject-matter or style. Only since the 1971 publication and staging of La Sagouine, the story of a charwoman who was memorably interpreted for the stage by Viola Léger, has Maillet come to the forefront as the voice of Acadia. She has been followed by an entire wave of Acadian novelists and poets. Maillet's country, by her own admission, exists more in time than in space. After the loss of the Acadian territory in 1755, Maillet points out, there was no land to identify with; there was a sense of nationhood, an ideology, a mentality, but no territory.

Enter the only figure capable of making a country out of all this once more: the writer. "Perhaps there may be little chance for Acadia's survival, perhaps her virtues are exhausted. But when I write, the old Acadia surfaces again." Certainly Maillet has given us a dreamed Acadia in her books, but perhaps this invented land is truer than the one we can see today on a drive along the coast from Caraquet to Shédiac. But all writers are in the business of transforming our vision of the place they come from, and in that area Maillet excels, for she has made her readers believe that Acadia really is those legendary figures and goings-on between the covers of her books.

There's no shortage of legendary characters and occurrences in her latest novel The Devil Is Loose, first published in French in 1984 and now available in Philip Stratford's English translation, published by Lester & Orpen Dennys. It's an old-fashioned story with real and concocted ghosts, raging seas, mysterious portents, village gossips, wise fools: the entire village microcosm. The book is set during American Prohibition, a time when Acadians (and not only Acadians) were fighting hard times by providing contraband liquor to their thirsty neighbours to the south. At one point the novel's swashbuckling heroine Crache-à-pic (literally, "straight-spitter") dresses up as a nun to cross the United States border on a mercy mission, an event that happened just that way, according to Crache-à-pic's creator. The heroine has sworn to operate her own family-run bootlegging operation, flying in the face of Dieudonné, supplier for the Mob in the States, including Al Capone, whom she hopes will turn up one foggy night off the Acadian shores. There are marvelous portraits of village life as Crache-à-pic and Dieudonné try to outfox each other under the indulgent eye of the local constable. But then Quicksilver, an officer who wants to make the law stick, arrives on the scene, and the inevitable happens: the untameable Crache-à-pic and the intensely upright Quicksilver fall in love. Their idyll enchants the village, and all goes well until a shotgun blast from the Dieudonné gang's boat puts an end to the unlikely couple's happiness. "It's a lot like Acadia's history," Maillet muses. "There's a lot of clowning and buffoonery and nonsense, but it turns out badly in the end."

The book gives Maillet's most typical Acadian characters a stage on which to strut their stuff. Never ones to be rushed, they are nevertheless equipped with a strong sense of timing and a tenacious patience. Their humor is like that of underdog peoples everywhere: a little defensive, never loud, always wry. And though they might be distrustful of outsiders at the start, they jump at the chance to roll up the rug and celebrate. Mariaagélas (translated by Ben-Zion Shek) tells a similar story about Maria, the daughter of Gélas, who turns to smuggling during Prohibition when she loses her job after punching a schoolteacher in the nose (the teacher had failed to give her kid sister the part of the Virgin Mary in the school play). It explores similar themes but without the love interest. There are boot-leggers, ghosts, and ersatz nuns, though with less of the appeal to tradition than in The Devil Is Loose. But in both books, the evil-doer is brought to justice in a particularly Acadian fashion.

In Devil Dieudonné and his cronies are brought to trial, but the villagers, including those closest to Crache-à-pic, suddenly lose the faculty of speech and forget where they were the night of the crime. The trial is made a shambles; justice, at least of the conventional variety, is roundly mocked. But this seeming non-co-operation by the villagers is actually designed to give Crache-à-pic the right occasion to set her trap. She inflicts a much more apt punishment on Dieudonné (which will not be wholly revealed here) based on the Acadian themes of exile both abroad and in one's own land. The village has spoken; the popular will has been done. That's the genius of Acadia, Maillet says. "An outlawed people will put themselves above the law."

Antonine Maillet won the Prix Goncourt in 1979 for Pélagie-la-charette (Doubleday published the English translation by Philip Stratford, Pélagie: The Return to a Homeland, in 1982). It was the first time France's most prestigious literary award had been won by someone not a native of France. Winning the prize opened the European continent for Maillet and raised her to the status of a fully accepted French-language writer. "The Goncourt gave me the assurance that I had really written a book in French!" Maillet laughs. "It was also a seal of approval for the Acadian language." This lettre de noblesse is especially important, for it chased away any question that Acadian writing and language were merely quaint, folkloric leftovers from an earlier time. Even if she has received approval from Paris, Maillet is no less Acadian now than before the Goncourt. There's a moral in the story: she won this internationally prestigious prize by being as resolutely local as possible.

Getting her language into English has been no small task, and we have Stratford to thank for delivering her two memorable heroines, Pélagie and Crache-à-pic, into lively English. Recalls Stratford, "Maillet didn't want a literal translation. She would tell me, 'Go ahead, be free.' That invitation to freedom let me be more inventive." What Stratford did with that freedom was to go back to what he calls his "treasure-hoard of past expressions" gathered from years of reading sea stories by C. S. Forester, Conrad, Kipling, and other sources, and create a salty, slightly archaic style that would recall the Atlantic provinces in the 1930s while avoiding the trap of a "dialect" translation.

After completing The Devil Is Loose, Maillet took a year off from writing to teach, read, travel, and lecture. Getting back to the grindstone proved difficult. She wanted to resume writing but it took another full year before she could completely limber up. But when her writer's block broke, it broke with a vengeance. Recently she completed a play and currently is finishing off a novel for fall 1986 publication with Leméac in Montreal.

Maillet works in a converted attic in her house, and a glance into her studio reveals the absence of a usual piece of equipment: there is no typewriter. She writes with a pencil in large notebooks of graph paper, a more effective way, perhaps, to reach back to the mythical Acadia and make it live for us again.