SOURCE: Mortimer, Mildred. Review of Comme si de rien n'était, by Marie Cardinal. World Literature Today 65, no. 4 (autumn 1991): 663-64.

In the following review, Mortimer characterizes Comme si de rien n'était as a novel that explores the power of language in gender relationships.

Born into a French family in colonial Algeria, Marie Cardinal now lives in France and Québec. Her numerous works include Les Mots pour le dire (1975), an autobiographical account of her own cure through Freudian psychoanalysis. The title of that earlier book, The Words to Say It, conveys the writer's quest for words to record events, revive past memories, and forge links of communication.

First articulating the process of healing and rebirth through writing, Cardinal's latest work, Comme si de rien n'était, centers on the spoken word, specifically on women speaking. The novel is one that the critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. would...