Barbe

by Julie Demers

L'air, le vent, le varech, les vagues. Le mont Saint-Pierre veille sur un petit village de Gaspésie bordé par l'eau salée du fleuve. L'hiver, les hommes partent chasser ou couper du bois dans la forêt. À leur retour, ils se rasent la barbe et font des enfants. 1944, l'homme de la maison n'est pas là. Il n'est jamais revenu depuis qu'il a remarqué la singulière pilosité de sa fille. Il est vrai qu'une jeune fille de onze ans affublée d'une barbe n'a rien de banal. Et les rideaux de plus en plus épais qu'installe la mère aux fenêtres intriguent autant qu'ils dissimulent.

Genres: Fiction, Canada, Adult Fiction

138 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 31, 2015

About the author

Julie Demers est née à Québec en 1987, a grandi à Drummondville et vit à Montréal. Diplômée en études cinématographiques, elle anime des ateliers sur le cinéma québécois à travers le Canada et publie dans divers magazines culturels.

Barbe est son premier roman.

Reviews

[Fran · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dark fairy tale, written beautifully. Lovely and disturbing at the same time. Reminiscent of Grendel.

[Bibliomaniaque · Rating 3 out of 5]

Une lecture intrigante, pour laquelle j’ai attendu un dénouement qui m’éclairerait, mais qui n’est finalement pas venu. Jusqu’à ce que je lise les autres avis ici, je croyais que c’était une histoire qui nécessitait une grande interprétation, qu’on lit et qu’on comprend un peu comme on le voit. Cela dit, j’en comprends que c’est finalement simplement un conte. Peut-être que si je m’étais concentrée sur cet aspect, je l’aurais lu autrement.

[Kirsty · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish that the publisher had kept the original title of Julie Demers' Barbe, translated literally as Beard. I know it doesn't make a great deal of difference, but to me, a self-confessed fan of beards, Little Beast is a slightly disappointing title. Given the blurb, I was expecting a fairytale-esque tale here, but what I found was really very little like that. The story, set in a remote part of Canada in 1944, is certainly strange and sensual, but the fairytale elements were quite few and far between.

The protagonist, an unnamed girl, is forced to hide in the woods due to persecution, but this could just as easily be a reflection on the Holocaust as a thread borrowed from fairytales. She is a peculiar character, but a beguiling one. I must admit that I found it impossible to try and work out her age at points; she was both terribly childlike and naive, but had strong sexual desires, which were explicitly rendered at a couple of points. Whilst interesting to read, I feel as though Little Beast was perhaps a little too short to be able to achieve everything it seemed the author wanted to.

[Jacob Kolody · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such a beautifully written (but dark) tale that kept me on the edge of my seat the entire time. Near the end I felt like Julie Demers couldn’t figure out how to end the story. The finale felt like a little bit of a cop-out but I still enjoyed it. I wish this was a full-blown novel, though. I would’ve loved to get deeper into the main character’s family dynamic and learn a little bit more about the village she came from. I do think her journey after the village was covered satisfactorily. I guess what I’m trying to say is that “Little Beast” felt like a middle and somewhat of an end when I would’ve liked it be a beginning, middle and end. Nevertheless, I still loved this little beast of a story.

[Jansie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Little Beast is beautifully written short work, but I feel like it could be so much more!
A little girl is confined to her home due to her family's embarrassment of the beard she has sprouted. She leaves her home when the men from the town come to remove her from the house. This book is written from the perspective of the girl, so it is not always apparent what the actual intentions of adults are. It would be interesting to know.
There are references to death and sexual content, so maybe not appropriate for young readers.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can’t even describe the way this book made me feel but I didn’t like it:)

[Ana · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Netgalley ARC provided by The Publisher in exchange for an honest review'

I believe this book has some serious potential. The style of writing feels original and unique and the fact that it is a pretty short read elevates the experience in this particular case, I feel. There is some depth to the words on this page, you can sense the disturbing thoughts and the angst, but I feel it is overly worked. Sounding original it also sounds fake and I think it sins there.
The book does not feel natural, you can sense a form over content conflict. I was excited about the premise, but I wanted more and I think there is a lot of room for improvement. That being said, I also believe it can be a polarizing tale, people will either love it or hate it and I think there is room for a lot of people to enjoy this book.

[Aude · Rating 3 out of 5]

J’ai beaucoup aimé l’originalité du roman mais une fin avec un peu plus de punch m’aurait fait du bien !
L’écriture était particulière mais je m’y suis vite habitué. J’ai passé un bon moment avec ce livre !!

[Biljana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Little Beast is a charming read. It tells the story of a little girl who grows a beard and subsequently her mother hides her away from the other townspeople. Once the townspeople arrive at the house, the little girl runs away and this story tells about her adventures. The book is short and beautifully written, but unfortunately it just didn't work for me. It was too slight and felt as though it should have served as a short story in a larger collection of stories, rather than a short book.

[Kalyne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Thank you to the publisher Coach House Books for giving me a copy of this book. I did enjoy the fairy tale aspect of this book but felt disconnected from the main character. It may have been the writing but I felt myself losing interest about half way though. If it was a longer book I might have put it down and given up.

[Victoria Peipert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful translation but choppy story. I loved the idea of this book but I think the actual chain of events were not as impactful as the writing style and descriptions.

[Jules Nymo · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Mother, goodbye. And goodbye to the village and the fountain and Christ on the cross that tells the time like a revelation. I took the longest road. I followed the pebbles, walked along the river, scrambled up the cliffs. I advanced against the current, with my back to the barking, away from the sound of the Boots. I dodged the bullets, fell in the ditch, ripped my tights. I tripped a hundred times and scraped my knees, a hundred times more, but eventually, I found it, my shelter.
And yet, nothing’s to say that they won’t find me and put a rope around my neck, the Boots.”

The premise of it felt as if it is a fairy tale, especially taking into consideration how short this novel is. An eleven years old girl has this abnormal beard and her father can't stand her. Her mother cares for her, but nobody else does. The villagers are out to get her. One day, they had enough and broke in the house, pressing to get the girl, who flees into the woods. I thought, ooo this must be exciting but nope, it wasn't. I have to give it some credit though because I enjoyed the beginning (example: the quote above is awesome) but after fifty pages, all of it felt fake. As if the author tried too hard to be poetic and failed.

There are some sentences that go like this:

"I have no more crass consciousness. I am just an empty form for mutating matter. I don't just cool down, I get rid of myself. I act completely naturally, as is my heredity, and I use 'I' only out of convention. There. It's done. I am nowhere. Rooted in nothing. Released from everything."

Uh... what? Trying so hard.

"Canada geese. Stunt flying. Formations.
Spring is taking over the sky. They travel in spirant squadrons. Majestic. Enduring. Drawn by something that can't be seen. One in front, the others behind. The sound from their throats resonates through the mountain."

FULL STOP.

The start, the end of "Little Beasts" was good. Its closure was a nice wrap-up, but unfortunately, it's a wrap-up to some flat plot that delivers nothing exciting or thought-provoking. Occasionally the writing is good too, but it is not consistent so a lot of times, it was also awful, trying too hard poetic type of writing I dislike. If this book wasn't so short, I might have abandoned it mid-through. Disappointed to say I would not recommend it.

[Brooke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Little Beast was an interesting and short read. The protagonist is an eleven-year-old girl, who has been confined to her home for years due to her beard. After the men in her village come to the house to expose her, she is forced to flee and hide in the woods. The story is told while she is in the woods and flips back and forth between memories of the past and her current situation as she tries to evade those who are looking for her. The girl is both naïve and mature, simple and philosophical.

I normally really enjoy this style of writing; however, I think the translation makes it a bit too choppy for my liking. There were shining moments, but more often than not I found myself getting a bit lost and having to go back to re-read, or just skimming over sections without really absorbing much. I understand and appreciate the stylistic choice, but I think the book could have been better if it was a bit longer and more flushed out.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of the book in exchange for an honest review!

[Megan (ReadingRover) · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this little folk tale about a bearded girl exiled from society and forced to live on her own in the wilderness. I also have to admit that this book is also a case of cover love for me! Yay me for picking it up at BEA18 while I was there!

[Simone · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5

Quick, unique, punchy. This was a weird little fairy tale that I didn’t totally ~get~ but I enjoyed

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the vein of The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches, Little Beast is a superbly bizarre book translated with a matching quality of peculiarity. This book is best imagined as being narrated by Isabelle Huppert... English or French, I imagine. I haven't felt this close to a main character in a while, nor have I been so curious to see what happens after the last page. However, I am satisfied with where Julie Demers ends the book and look forward to reading this one again... perhaps later this year, for I wouldn't be surprised if Rhonda Mullins is nominated for a Governor General's Literary Award for translation for her work.

[Katy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A quick, stream of consciousness read that struggled to hold my interest.

[Charlie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Short bursts of beauty, but overall felt cliched and rote, familiar in an uninteresting way.

[Eden Thompson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Visit JetBlackDragonfly (The Man Who Read Too Much) at www.edenthompson.ca/blog

Little Beast is a strange little novella translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins; intriguing and well written, but left me nonplussed. It's an odd story of rural Quebec in 1944, a young girl, and the wilderness.

Riviere-a-Pierre, at the foot of the mountains, is a quiet village only the river bothered with. An eleven year-old girl has lived her life with her mother, strictly taught to watch the world from behind the curtains. The windows stayed closed, the doors closed, even her mother's eyes when she looks at her. For the girl has grown a beard.
Villagers pester the mother with questions - why is she not in school? why does she never the house? - finally breaking into the home to find out.

Weeks have gone by since the girl ran into the narrow hills of the Chic-Choc mountains and built a shelter of branches, burrs and lichen, far in the woods away from the long trail that leads to where the people are. She eats bark and whatever she can find; except for the trapped Hare she keeps as comfort, holding the dead body to her chest. Wind and animal howls slip under the door, but she is never scared.
After a storm destroys the hut, she sets everything alight and moves into a cave, before discovering two hunters camping out with a tamed bear on a lead. They know of the girl, and it will take some cunning to steal their food without getting caught. For if she is caught, they will cage her like an animal and return her to the dangers of the villagers, who think there is something wrong with a bearded little girl.

"You're not a monster, Mother used to say. Just a little beast."
This is literally a wild story; this girl is feral. Too realistic a story to be a fairy tale, yet too odd to be more than a fable. While the writing held my attention, I don't know the larger meaning of it. I was entertained, and as it is a short novella, I read it in one sitting. Demers cetainly paints a vivid picture of the wilderness and the level of survival needed, the remoteness of place at the time, eighty years ago.
The original French title is Barbe (Beard), which I prefer.
I don't know anyone I would recommend this to. For those this story interests, you'll be entertained.

[Lily · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a sparse, freaky little novella about a young girl in rural Quebec who grows a beard. She is locked away, gets chased out of her home by "the men in Boots," barely survives in the forest, gets captured and returns home. In between there are some truly chilling and visceral passages. The way she described smells, sex, pain, hunger, sleep and wakefulness, and a whole host of other physical sensations was just very...animalistic and unhuman. Pretty freaky stuff.

The last scene was what saved it for me. She comes back to her home and violently shaves off her beard, only to have it grow back immediately on crossing the threshold. That was a pretty cool ending.

On the back of the book, it was billed as a twisted fairy tale, but I read it more as an existentialist treatise on how we are all animals. I din't love it, didn't even enjoy it that much actually, but I do respect it as a literary achievement. Good job, Julie. (Also the cover is beautiful and the pages are pretty great to turn and play with, this really great creamy card stock with some slight, tactile ridges on the page that I haven't seen in books before. So, bookbinding: A+)

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

A vivid and unusual read with brutal and sporadically philosophical prose. My complaint is that, despite how short the book already is, the plot seems to lose itself in the middle sections for the sake of creating more space for the author's writing. Now, I get that a "logical" plot isn't the author's goal so much as social critique - specifically regarding masculinity, appearances (physical and social), and hypocrisy. (I'm not an English major. Please tell what else you all are reading in it!) And I get that the narrative intentionally verges into magical realism and folktale-like storytelling, which I appreciate and enjoy. But I thought the shunned-and-feared-for-being-different trope, which provided much of the story's structure, was a cheap package for the author's much more interesting social/philosophical critiques.

[Kris · Rating 2 out of 5]

This does not feel so much as a novel than a stream of consciousness and a rather odd one at that. Initially it baffled and fascinated me in equal measure.

To describe this Canadian novel, translated from French, is really hard. It is only short, 128 pages, but it is pretty intense. Throughout you are caught in the narrator’s thought process, which is disjointed and unreliable. You wonder whether she is crazy or whether the world around her is really has mad as it seem through her eyes.

Whether it is the original writing or the translation I am not sure, but it did not quite work for me personally. I like quirky, but this one was just a step too far and although I never considered not finishing it, I found I did get a bit fed up with the bizarre narrative.

Unfortunately, this book was not for me.

[Laura Newsholme · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a lyrical exploration of survival and the issues of 'otherness' that I raced through in one sitting. The plot, such as it is, is linear and straightforward - a young girl is born and grows to childhood, at which point she grows a beard and has to flee the Boots. The descriptions of the forest are beautiful and the protagonist is somehow entirely believable while also being something from fairy tales. I thought that the way the narrative was constructed from a formal perspective was really interesting, with page breaks and line breaks creating a poetical feeling. All in all, this is a fascinating read that will stay with me for a good long time.
I received a free copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sparse short work following the life of a bearded young woman in Quebec. It is told from the perspective of the young woman. Village officials take a marked interest in the young woman her mother, fearing persecution, sequesters her into their home. The book follows her frustration with the experience and her eventual escape. It reminds me of Emily Fridlund's History of Wolves in its interiority of a young woman in the frigid north. It is described in terms of fairy tales but I found it to be more gothic--some magical elements but mostly dark. It was quick read but I found myself wanting a bit more but it is among the better of the short/sparse vaguely magical realist books I have read this year (see Peach, The End We Start From).

[Correy Baldwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

A fantastical, imaginative story about a girl with a beard, living in the woods. Or, rather, a piece of overly self-conscious writing that is trying oh so hard to be strange and clever and poetic, and in the end has hardly anything interesting to say. To quote the book back to itself: “Nonsense is surprising at first, but after a bit there is nothing surprising about it.”

I expected there to be a critique of gender, but it’s difficult to parse any such meaning from the text; it is too busy being clever—too clever for its own good, in my opinion. It’s too bad, because Demers clearly has a playful imagination, and an eye for the bizarre. And the translation seemed quite good. A missed opportunity.

[Oona · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very quick and easy read. The translation felt a bit clumsy from time to time but I didn’t really mind it. While reading the book, I sometimes felt like I was reading a children’s book with the writing style being very simple and then it would turn really philosophical and different. There were some beautiful quotes scattered around the whole book.

The plot sounds peculiar and the book had potential but it didn’t fulfill my expectations. Did enjoy reading it but it was just an alright book for me.

[Sarada · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I enjoy abstract, stream-of-consciousness writing, this book does not seem to have enough ideas underpinning the style to keep it aloft. It felt more like someone filling up space for a NaNoWriMo novel, than something well thought out and executed with a goal in mind. I think I picked it up because I liked the idea of a strange child with a beard going out into the wild Canadian winter night, but it failed to deliver much of interest.

[Cindy C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really think this book should have kept the translated name 'Beard' as in itself it classifies a girl with facial hair as non-human/beast and that's not really a great message to be sending. I think that overall the story is interesting, albeit dark, but that the writing felt very abbreviated. The storyline didn't extend as far as I'd hoped and the ending was the same..it feels like nothing really happens.

[Samoyes · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a quick read that will have you hooked all the way through. The main character is a girl I will not soon forget. I loooved this book. I want to push into the hands of everyone. It's a tight story of a girl in isolation and her struggles to survive. While it is a short text, it explores big themes, particularly gender. I cant wait to read more from this author.

[Megan Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another little weirdo that I picked up off a staff recommendation shelf at Book People when visiting Austin. A bold and moving contemporary fairy tale sort of story. Wish I could read it in a philosophy class or grad school and talk with lots of smart people about it. So many things going on in such a small package. Also wish I could read it in the original French...