It is easy to imagine Nicole Brossard, a small woman of great presence, declaiming lyric passages from her latest novel, Baroque at Dawn. The book is studded with long poetic riffs that cry out, even in translation, to be heard.

Brossard is the master of the headlong, breathless, involving description. This, her 30th book, opens with pages and pages detailing a lesbian encounter between a novelist in her 50s, named Cybil Noland, and a young violinist. It is an arresting beginning that showcases the talent that won Brossard a Governor General’s Award for her poetry, as well as Quebec’s Prix Athanse-David for the whole of her work.

But the opening, we learn in the second section, is a fiction written by Noland who is troubled that she has used herself as a character. As she tries to decide whether to keep the story, she reflects on a conversation she had in London five years before with an English novelist named Nicole Brossard.

And with this twist, the reader is truly set adrift while Brossard (the French novelist) plunges into the novel’s main concerns: questions about reality (both fictional and virtual) and the power of images (both verbal and technological).

In contrast, the plot is simply told in the central section. Noland agrees to write a book about the sea, with the aid of woman photographer, for a woman oceanographer. The trio go to Buenos Aires where they join a team of oceanographers and divers from Quebec. They set out to sea to test a virtual-reality program about undersea diving.

The final section consists of the notes of an English novelist who is in Quebec publicizing a book. She appears to be the Nicole Brossard that Cybil Noland met in London, but the reader can only surmise. This, like everything else in the book – except the bodies of women – is a construct of the mind. Indeed, sex between women is the most concrete aspect of the book, which is exuberantly preoccupied with sexual attraction and immediate gratification.
For the most part, translator Patricia Claxton keeps pace with Brossard’s flights, both sexual and poetic. However, there are certain inexact words that distort the overall effect. For example, “tuba,” the French term for “snorkel,” is untranslated. It is a shame for a book so focused on images to contain language that inadvertently confuses.