SOURCE: Malin, Irving. Review of Mauve Desert, by Nicole Brossard. Review of Contemporary Fiction 12, no. 1 (spring 1992): 158.

In the following review, Malin comments favorably on Brossard's “subversive, otherworldly” novel Mauve Desert, admiring its play with perception, language, and reality.

The epigraph to this wonderfully constructed novel [Mauve Desert] is by Calvino: “Reading is going toward something that is about to be, and no one yet knows what it will be.” The epigraph suggests that reading is an “adventure”—an approach to some final meaning. But it also implies that this adventure is somehow dangerous—there may not, after all, be a complete disclosure, an ultimate truth. The epigraph hints at uncertainty, misdirection, indirection.

When we first read the novel we don't know how to summarize and interpret it. The novel consists of at least three parts—Mélanie travels across the desert to escape her mother and the ordinary...