White Resin - by Audrée Wilhelmy (Paperback)

About the Book

An ethereal love story of the almost-impossible reconciliation between the manufactured world and the haunting and feminine nature that envelops it.

Book Synopsis

White Resin is an ethereal love story of the almost-impossible reconciliation between the manufactured world and the haunting and feminine nature that envelops it.

In this impassioned and wildly imagined story of creation, a girl named Dãa, is born to "twenty-four mothers," the sisters of a convent at the edge of the Quebec taiga. Nearby, at the Kohle mining company, a woman dies giving birth to Laure, a child with albinism, in the workers' canteen. What follows is a dream-like recounting of their love affair and the family they bear, a captivating magic-realist tale of origins and opposites, that would be fantastical if it did not ring so true to the boreal north. White Resin is at once a dream-like romance and an homage to gorgeous, feral, and fecund nature as it both stands against and entwined with the industrial world.

Review Quotes

"[A] poetic, imaginative tale about the relationship between nature and industry." -- Chatelaine

"By means of a demanding and chiseled prose, eminently poetic, rich in neologisms and in borrowings from native and northern European languages ​​(several can be found in a very convenient 'Lexicon'), Wilhelmy draws us into a reality that is both familiar and transfigured, where femininity and nature maintain profound and mysterious relationships." -- Nuit Blanche

"Like the places she creates, Audrée Wilhelmy's literary domain is vast and never ceases to dazzle." -- Lettres québécoises

"The lingering power of the story lies with the vivid imagery Wilhelmy conjures ... Susan Ouriou's translation is a marvel of precision and musicality." -- Canadian Notes & Queries

"There is something about Audrée Wilhelmy I cannot find anywhere else. It's in her style, of course. In her method, certainly. In her inventiveness, no doubt. But it goes beyond all that. With Wilhelmy, it lies in the pact she makes with the reader, as if the singularity of the universe she offers us does not come so much from literature, as from witchcraft. An ode to all-powerful freedom: of the body, of the land, of language, and of the feminine." -- Voir.ca

"White Resin restores a vision of the Canadian wilderness more in line with Indigenous ideas of a mutually dependent relationship between humanity and the natural environment. As a novel for our ecologically riven moment, it's particularly powerful. As a lyrical, strange, occasionally mysterious story, it is unlike most anything else you're likely to read in quite a while." -- That Shakespearean Rag

"White Resin is an enchanting, heartbreaking novel." -- Miramichi Reader