BOTH THESE recent Quebec novels have female protagonists, depend for their effectsmore on images than on plot or characterization, and leave the reader, at theend, with more questions than answers. Both were translated by Sheila Fischman.Beyond that, they have very little in common, except that they are bothdefinitely worth reading. Lise Bissonnette is well known as a journalist, former editor,and current publisher of Le Devoir inMontreal. Following the Summer, her first novel, portrays an isolated miningtown in Abitibi, a dying community on the brink of ecological disaster, throughthe tenuous relationships of a few individuals. Marie, the protagonist, is a20-year-old schoolteacher, aware that there are fewer children in her classevery year, although the principal denies it. At the beginning of the novel,she chances to meet Corinne, a waitress, loud, working class, sexuallypromiscuous, the sort of woman she might never have spoken to if she had notunconsciously been looking for something otherwise missing from her life. Marie is engaged to and ultimatelymarries Ervant, a troubled Eastern European immigrant whose desire to make ahome contrasts sharply with the direction of those in the community who aredrifting away: The people of this land don`t put downroots. They live where they can, along the roads going north, between truckstops. They do not make gardens; they cover their houses with tarpaper, held inplace by temporary laths. They wait, then they move on again, amidst the penurythat clings to those who open the roads. That is why we know nothing aboutthem. With both Corinne and Ervant, Marie triesto grasp a vitality, an otherness that etudes her. Ervant tells her stories ofhis life as a refugee in Vienna, the most striking about an eight-year-oldgirt, Fatima, who tried to seduce him. Corinne tells stories, no less exotic,about the prostitutes from their home town, a world as remote as the Europeanone Ervant describes. After her marriage and honeymoon in New York, Marie losestouch with Corinne, but then seeks her out after encountering Diane, a studentshe suspects might be an incest victim. She consoles herself for her inabilityto help Diane by seeing the girl as, like Corinne, "a survivor, a thistle."But when Marie again encounters Corinne, pregnant with a child who proves to besomething of a mutant, she has lost the toughness that first attracted Marie.The novel leaves us with competing images of Corinne as survivor and as victim."You could be an immigrant in your own country," a young man who hadworked in the bar with her tells Marie. Perhaps Marie, wanting or needing asurvivor, invested Corinne with her own strength. At the end of the novel,Corinne moves further north; Marie stays, the thistle who clings to a thin,barren soil. tlise Turcotte`s novel, The Sound of Living Things, focuses on arelationship scarcely ever treated seriously in fiction: the day-todayinteractions of a mother and her threeto four-year-old daughter. Albanie is a single mother who dislikes her jobin a library; she lives for the intensity she experiences with her child,Maria. There are other characters in the novel: Maria`s father, who takes heron weekends; Albanie`s bestfriend, Jeanne, another single mother; Jeanne`s son Gabriel; Felix, a neglectedchild who lives across the street; Agnes, an eccentric Albanie sees every dayin the library; Pierre, a social worker who falls in love with Albanie, or perhaps with the image of mother andchild. But the central drama concerns Albanie and Maria, the meaning they give to one another`s lives, andAlbanie`s struggle to capture theevanescence of her experience in words: "For Maria, I am the person who isthere. I am the present tense." Despite the fact that Maria keeps hermother rooted in the present, Albanie also gives shape to the past and the future, through images and wordsculled from everyday life, from books they read, from their fantasies anddreams, to construct a dream book that will give them two existences, morelife: "It would be at our bedside like a nightlight, reminding us that weexist and that we must be stronger than our fear." In addition, Albanie must negotiate complex, interwovenemotional tensions -she is trying to separate emotionalty from her memories ofMaria`s father and from her exclusive closeness to Maria to have the strengthto forge a new relationship with Pierre. However, this more conventionalromantic thread does not overwhelm Albanie`s effort to put her day-to-day experiences with Maria intowords, so that, as she says, "the time that is passing will not place itshand over one of my eyes." Sheila Fischman has given us veryreadable translations of two books that, like many other contemporary Quebecoisnovels, break with fictional conventions to explore new terrain. BothBissonnette and Turcotte have taken on enormous challenges: Bissonnette triesto convey the feeling of a community whose very quality of impermanence makesit difficult to grasp. Her novel is cerebral and elliptical, with occasionalflashes of a sensuality that is threatening or sinister. Turcotte attempts togive her readers the sensuous rhythms of daily life: the joys, the anxieties,the dreads, the romance, of a relationship that is primary but has beenvirtually unspeakable. Both writers remind us that, as Albanie puts it, throughwords, "we come closer and closer to what we are."