[The reader] of Anne Hébert's The Silent Rooms (Les Chambres de Bois) will find that it is a novel about the choice between human normalcy and one kind of art. The English reader may therefore be surprised. The Silent Rooms is not a "modern" novel in the sense of an obvious technical breakthrough. However, it was, and is, a revolutionary novel in French Canada which deals with the alienation of the artist, a theme long familiar to students of English poetry. The Silent Rooms is symbolist, psychological, legend-like, and terse. It is the work of a poet … drawn out beyond symbol into a tale. It poses the choice not between the life of the layman and the life of the artist (painter, poet or musician), but rather, between the sensitive layman (Catherine, the heroine) who is drawn by an artist's love and the artist (Michel, the hero...