The GIantess

Laurence Vilaine

(Zulma, 192 pages, 2020)

Noële has spent most of her life in the shadow of the Giantess, the imposing mountain that looms over her small village. She leads an austere existence according to the rhythm of the seasons, with only her mute younger brother, Rimbaud, for company. The arrival of two passing strangers frays and loosens her tightly woven daily routine, awakening her to a world of sensations and emotions that she did not know she possessed.

Noële and Rimbaud share a reverential relationship with the wilderness that surrounds them: he a freely roaming eternal child attuned to the screech of the owl and the voiceless language of stones; she a local healer dispensing herbal remedies and ointments to her neighbors, a knowledge she inherited from The Aunt, the good but stern samaritan who raised them. The strangers, Carmen and Maxim, are two reporters involved in a secret and passionate love affair. She travels the world while he, battling a terminal illness, isolates himself in Noële’s village. From her faraway assignments, Carmen sends her colleague and lover a steady flow of letters, which alternate between reports from the field and burning declarations of longing and desire. But Maxim soon plunges into silence, only allowing Noële, his neighbor, to come in to light the fire in his chimney and pick up his mail. Noële salvages the discarded letters, and unwilling to let the story end, takes matter into her hands.

The Giantess invites us into the secret intimacy of three solitary individuals, who, each in their own way, find solace in the natural world attentively described with Vilaine’s exquisite, lyrical prose. Half benevolent witch, half intriguing old lady, Noële evokes a mythical figure in this modern tale of life, love, and death. What she at first discovers by proxy—the joys and the torments of a life fully lived—will take root in her own body and mind. She learns to massage her own callused hands with the healing salve that until now she had only reserved for others.

Laurence Vilaine is a writer and author of traveling guides for Gallimard and Actes Sud. She published her first acclaimed novel in 2011, Le silence ne sera qu’un souvenir (Gaïa Éditions) followed by La Grande Villa (Gaïa Éditions, 2016.)