Quebec novelist Nicole Brossard clearly enjoys playing games with her readers. In her last novel, Baroque at Dawn, she had a character who wrote in English named Nicole Brossard, and it was never clear just which level of meaning was the one she wanted her readers to fix upon. In her new novel, Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon, she also has a novelist who muses about storytelling, and the book ends with a series of notes that may or not be parts of the novelist’s book.

“Marvellous!” a fan will say, hoping that once again Brossard has executed a tour de force, this time by mixing philosophy with fiction in a complicated tale detailing the memories and musings of four women. Two of the four spend their lives in museums, studying objects that represent the actions and civilizations of the past. A third is writing about the death of Descartes. The fourth is working on unravelling the secrets of life at the genetic level. All live mostly in their heads, although we are treated to short glimpses of the beautiful shoulders of lovers and quick, clinical references to female masturbation.

The last 80 pages slip from sections in which the action is seen from the points of view of individual characters into a sort of dramatic reading. The women fling their thoughts into the air as if they would float the way words do in high-class French comic books.

It is exactly this sort of playing with form that will enrage readers who are less fond of literary games. “Where is the emotion?” they will ask. Even though the narrator whose voice opens the story has recently lost her mother to death, and the central action concerns the reuniting of a woman with her granddaughter whom she hasn’t seen in 20 years, the characters seem to be acting without feeling the sorrow or love that these situations should evoke. Furthermore, the translation by Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood does not do justice to Brossard’s poetic moments, and stumbles occasionally in more prosaic passages.