ABSTRACT
Dominique Mainard’s fictional world recalls that of Carson McCullers, the classic American explorer of the troubled human soul. Showing little, if any, respect for social norms and conventional behavior, Mainard’s single-minded rebels and castoffs sometimes broach, even transgress, the frontiers of the illicit. Striking images and enigmatic emotions can be found throughout Mainard’s two collections, Le Second Enfant and La Maison des fatigues. But it must be said that her recent long fiction—Leur histoire, followed by Le Ciel des chevaux, a novel about an impossible love between a sister and her mentally deranged brother—is even more subtle than her short stories because she has distanced herself somewhat from the narration of spectacular symbolic acts. There are many such moments in Mainard’s fiction, which reveals time and again how both speech and speechlessness conceal mysteries greater than words can tell: those labyrinthine realms of feeling in which the heart is indeed a lonely hunter.
