Winner of the Horizons Imaginaires speculative-fiction award and the City of Quebec book award, this debut collection follows Laura, a biologist fighting to understand the nature and scope of the changes transforming her own body and others' in the flooded landscape under the toxic-green skies of Shivering Heights.
With a devotion to language, to rhythm, to imagery (beautifully translated by Pablo Strauss) Vadnais injects a mythical, even scriptural quality to the stark realities of global warming ... As much as I love the anger and passion of a book like James Bradley’s Ghost Species or the harrowing climate catastrophes collected in McSweeney’s 2040 A.D., it pleases me no end that there is space in this sub-genre for books as lyrical and strange as Fauna.
Fauna paints a lush and dreamy landscape, but with a touch of the grotesque. Scientific terms and Latin names are threaded into sumptuous descriptions. One of Vadnais’s recurring characters, Laura, is a biologist who sees living things in their most visceral form, and her vignettes gave me horror-story shivers ... As a translation, Fauna reads easily and captures the lyrical, organic flow of the French. While I tend to prefer concision and simplicity in English writing, Strauss won me over with gorgeous lines ... Despite the fantastic events that occur, the stories in Fauna feel less like fiction and more like twisted reflections of our world. Polluted waters, ravaging floods, and a deadly contagion are all terrible realities that people across the globe are facing today. But even with the stories’ grim premise, they never turn cynical. Instead of portending doom, Vadnais’s words sound like a rallying cry ... I hope the world will listen.
The ten stories vary in tone, though more often than not they have a dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish, aspect ... With a devotion to language, to rhythm, to imagery (beautifully translated by Pablo Strauss) Vadnais injects a mythical, even scriptural quality to the stark realities of global warming ... it pleases me no end that there is space in this sub-genre for books as lyrical and strange as Fauna.
