Poverty, sickness, deprivation and despair form the background of ["The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange," a] lyrical novel about the daily life of its title character, a little French-Canadian girl growing up in a world of institutionalized violence and hopelessness. [Its author] … moves her narrator back and forth from the absurdly repressive atmosphere of a convent school to the homes of her family and friends, where spiritual and physical death compete with one another for victims, and bear almost equal weight in their terrible intensity. Against this hellish context, Marie-Claire Blais has managed to recall and convey something very close to the essence of childhood: Pauline's special loneliness, the fierceness and tenacity of her friendships, those places where fear lies—in short, that whole "other" life which is lived within the secret subculture of children and seems so inaccessible once beyond it.

We grow to like and admire Pauline...