[In the following review, Green discusses the plot and thematic content of Brossard's novel Baroque d'aube, noting its glorification of women and dismissive depiction of male characters.]

At daybreak, Cybil Noland, the middle-aged écrivaine, heroine, and narrator of Baroque d'aube, brings to orgasm an unknown woman, picked up in the hotel's elevator. She learned in her youth to look straight into the eyes of women, and the beautiful young girl responded. Reader, don't put down the book after this first paragraph! The novel is not about lesbian love but rather the gestation of a novel, the intricate problems of the creative process, and the many questions it raises. The girl exits from Nicole Brossard's novel after the first chapter but emerges as the dramatis persona of the écrivaine's book. She turns out to be a gifted violinist with an adventure-filled life.

Daybreak intonates the novel and enlightens the second word of the title, while baroque has many ramifications. Cybil has a baroque heart, a baroque imagination, and above all a baroque, exuberant style. Brossard cannot suppress the poet of her innermost being. Clusters of images sprint forth irrepressibly from her fertile imagination. They are always original, striking, and often memorable.

The main body of the novel deals with an unusual sea voyage, undertaken by three creative women: our auteure, a surrealist photographer, and an equally surrealist oceanographer. The last worries that the abstractions of science will eventually empty the sea of its symbolic significance. She wants to celebrate the still-existing symbolism with an album, created by the three of them. She counts on the two artists to nourish the symbols. The writer and the photographer spend a few days in the ship's library, filled to the brim with novels, engravings, and magazines dealing with seafare. After this first stage, the two artists are immersed into the sea. Actually, they are watching underwater life on a computer screen; but, with the help of the latest technology, they are treated to a lived experience of visual and tactile sensations. At this point, Cybil gives free rein to her baroque imagination, transforming the sea fauna and flora into stunning images.

The women in Brossard's universe are creative, articulate, generous, endowed with a superb, analytic intelligence. On the other hand, the few men who flit in and out of the novel are disgustingly hairy or have a protruding Adam's apple. They are silent or inarticulate. When one of them turns out to be a good conversationalist, he is likened to a shark. Another man eyewitnessed a gang rape and remarks airily that it was good fun for the boys, although it did not suit the girls. Mothers are loving, giving, admirable, and adorable beings; fathers, however, are just playing the role of being a father. When Cybil scrutinizes the old engravings in the library, she observes that women are depicted either as mysterious, fertile creatures or as prey. Men, on the other hand, with their well-sculpted genitals pointed toward heaven, seem to implore God to cleanse the female sexual organs of all impurities.

In a circular motion, Baroque d'aube started with daybreak and ends with it: “Montréal scintille, grand tatouage mauve entre la nuit et les premières lueures de l'aube.” The light of daybreak and the light of words fuse in the eyes of the young translator who translates Cybil's completed fiction.