SOURCE: Imbert, Patrick. “Hystory.” Canadian Literature 122-123 (autumn-winter 1989): 199-200.

In the following review, Imbert discusses the problem of linguistic and historical representation and offers a positive assessment of Ana Historic.

This story is real cute: “Canadians don't know how to speak proper English.” Both themes—the question of the story (the title, Ana Historic, questions the subtitle: “a novel”) and the question of power and exploitation—are built into language and into society. Society was, in 1873, very much dependent on the colonizing power. This leads us to the main problematic: the status of women and their dispossession through men's values, men's language.

“True or cute, but not both, too true.” We could say that part of the story lies in this structure of declining to put two adjectives together. The narrative rests on a constant counterpoint between the unwritten story of a “cute” woman, Ana Richards, who (we...