[Like much of québécois fiction "Le Torrent"] shows the distorting effect of a strict religious upbringing, in this case the stunting of the life of a child by a pious mother who is paying off an old debt to society…. The whole story is built round a series of polarities; the hero is held … between the attraction of a world of movement, smell, colour and danger … and the inculcated urge to call all this evil and master it…. There is no way out of this anguished state and the end can only be tragic. The tragic tone is created above all by an exalted simplicity of writing that reminds one of Camus's L'Etranger. "Le Torrent" is the work of a considerable poet.

Now, thirty years later, in Les infants du sabat, Anne Hébert is still caught in the same dilemmas, or at least she continues...