[In "The Opoponax" Monique Wittig] has made what can only be called a brilliant re-entry into childhood.

In both form and content, "The Opoponax" is a revolutionary story. It is not told in the first person singular. The child who tells it refers to herself by her full name, Catherine Legrand. Yet it is her own story seen through her own eyes as she lives it…. [The passage of time in the novel] is not recorded according to an adult conception of days and weeks and months and years.

Monique Wittig 1935?– ©Jerry Bauer

It is Catherine Legrand's time. It unfolds like an accordion, still tightly pleated at the start and then flattening out wider and wider as her physical and mental capacities stretch to meet experience….

Who is this Catherine Legrand in whose life we become so immersed? Like every child, she is a highly individual person…. No...