Review: Toast for Two Tongues by Gisèle Villeneuve
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher in return for an honest review.
‘Toast for Two Tongues is a vibrant celebration of the untranslatable. Through nine stories, Gisèle Villeneuve’s interpretation of bilingual life shows moments of complete understanding across culture, age, time, and planes of existence, that sweeten the sometimes-bitter friction between culture and language.
‘The collection features four initial narratives that speak to four matching counterparts, all bound together by the provocative postface, And What If You Burned My Bilingual Toast. A blustery horse trader from Montana shares tall tales in a diner in Panorama, Saskatchewan. A woman trains herself to hold her breath underwater. Four climbers emerge from a day lost at Mystic Canyon. An unnamed narrator grapples with the death of his Czech parents.
‘These Far Ouest stories bridge the gaps between myth and reality, exile and home. Bohemian, evocative, and deeply nourishing, this collection invites you back for seconds.’
As you might expect of a short story collection from a poet, Toast for Two Tongues, by Gisèle Villeneuve, is beautifully written throughout, with lyrical, sensual descriptions that immerse you in her characters’ worlds. While I found something to like in each of the stories, there were three that particularly stood out to me.
In A Winter of Water Experiments, a young girl fixates upon teaching herself to stay underwater for longer and longer periods of time, using her family’s bathtub because it’s the wrong time of year for lake swimming. I was drawn to the character by her unusual (for her age) inventiveness, discipline, and dedication to researching and experimenting with ways she could adapt to the cold.
The eerie feel of the snatches of time she spends submerged, and the sense her body was becoming like that of an Arctic-dwelling animal put me in mind of Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea. A few stories later, in Sitter and Boyfriend, we get a rather more prosaic take on the same story where the titular couple freak out thinking their charge has tried to drown herself!
I also especially liked Verre De Bohême, where a man visits the ruin of what was once the opulent home of his Czech parents, where he initially claims to have been conceived. Although, as it transpires, he never lived in this house, in his mind, he rebuilds and refurnishes it, then populates it with talented, interesting dinner party guests – who we then discover all died in the Second World War. His parents survive, only to flee to America to escape Communism. With themes of place, intergenerational trauma, fictionalised memories, and the stories we tell ourselves and each other, this haunting piece really captivated me.
Another eerie episode with themes of memories and stories is At Your Own Risk – a literary take on the “hiking trip gone wrong” horror trope. Four bewildered hikers make it to a diner after a disastrous trek through Mystic Canyon and attempt to make sense of their recent experiences: every tool and supply that could go missing, did; they got hopelessly lost; and they struggle to agree on even the most salient of facts. They think they might have scaled the legendary Red Woman rock formation, but their memories of it are slippery. It’s fantastically unsettling.
I additionally appreciated the second/third-person autobiographical postface, And What If You Burned My Bilingual Toast. While I have heard poems and songs that make use of two languages, I’ve never really given much thought to them. It was therefore really interesting to read that French-speaking critics in particular have been quick to assume that bi-langue writers like Villeneuve who combine French and English are deficient in both languages, switching from one to the other depending on which language they find it easier to write any given line in (English speakers, by contrast, tend to find the pivot to French a delightful surprise).
In fact – as I’d sort-of assumed and Villeneuve goes on to elaborate – jumping between two languages in a piece of writing is a sign of a superior command of both. The poet is required, after all, to play with words and sounds, and deeply consider their choices of these and their desired effect on the reader/listener. Villeneuve herself very deliberately mixes languages to make her poems fun, distinctive, and just a little unnerving to listen to.
She also discusses how language in Canada, as an officially bilingual country, works in practice, and makes the thought-provoking point that bi-langue writing can help writers decolonise and resolve multiple identities: they don’t have to make a choice between the language of their ancestors from another country and the language they’ve grown up with; they have the option to combine them and honour both.
Toast for Two Tongues is a compelling, lyrical, and atmospheric collection.