[In "The Opoponax" Monique Wittig] has made what can only be called a brilliant re-entry into childhood.

In both form and content, "The Opoponax" is a revolutionary story. It is not told in the first person singular. The child who tells it refers to herself by her full name, Catherine Legrand. Yet it is her own story seen through her own eyes as she lives it…. [The passage of time in the novel] is not recorded according to an adult conception of days and weeks and months and years.

It is Catherine Legrand's time. It unfolds like an accordion, still tightly pleated at the start and then flattening out wider and wider as her physical and mental capacities stretch to meet experience….

Who is this Catherine Legrand in whose life we become so immersed? Like every child, she is a highly individual person…. No one else sees the woods, the animals, the flowers, the frozen puddles, the colors of the sky or the other children (of whom there are many, all equally alive) or the various teachers, as Catherine Legrand sees them, her eyes being, like the eyes of each of us, unique. Yet the rush of her impressions, succeeding one another with lightning rapidity (and unbroken by conventional punctuation or paragraphing which the author astonishingly and for the most part successfully ignores), has the rhythm and helter-skelter and vitality of every awakening mind.

These impetuous, brook-like impressions of Catherine Legrand constitute the story. They are all entirely objective. They echo, without ever describing, the subjective repercussions upon her. What happens to her happens through the senses….

At the convent school, Catherine Legrand starts a notebook on which, in fine lettering, she prints her most private, invented word: Opoponax. Opoponax stands for bedevilment, for whatever it is that keeps the desk from closing when there is something to hide in it, that mists the mirror, runs over the face in the dark, keeps at a distance the girl with the long hair and tender nape and impels her to hold hands with another. Not just Catherine Legrand, but everyone has an opoponax under whatever name….

[The] outside world, taped so exactly and with such passionate awareness by a small girl's built-in tape-recorder, becomes the inner world of herself.

Apparently simple in its flow of direct, declarative sentences, "The Opoponax" is in fact a kind of incantation, reminiscent of Ramuz and Péguy in its cadenced, cumulative effect.