ABSTRACT
Two geometric metaphors come to mind whenever I read the novels, novel-las, prose poems, and poems of Laurence Werner David (b. 1970). Hauteur, first of all, because of the height at which she sets ambitions for literature and because of her precise, resonant, richly evocative diction. Profondeur, secondly, because of her ability to point to psychological depths which seemingly lie beyond—or rather, beneath—the descriptive power of language yet which nonetheless remain tensely present, strangely palpable, in her narratives and poems. In both the novella Un autre dieu pour Violette (Another God for Violette, 2003) and the novel Contrefort (2006)—a title indicating “buttress” (as in the English “counterfort”), “foothill,” and specifically a steep geological “spur” behind the “Lakspur” summer home that haunts the memories of the three main protagonists—, the genuine stories consist as much of language confronting the inexpressible (or what resists revelation) as the intricate vicissitudes of out-of-the-ordinary conjunctions of vivid, perhaps ultimately unfathomable characters.
