Abstract
Nancy Huston “entered” literature through a change of language: writing in French, and abandoning for a moment her native English, marked the beginning of her writing and later led her to question her own identity. Why leave behind her “mother tongue”? Is it possible to abandon a language, one’s place of origin, forever and reinvent oneself elsewhere? The present work seeks to explore these questions based on Huston’s book Nord perdu (Losing North: Musings on Land, Tongue and Self) in which the author dwells on her childhood memories in Canada and Germany and on her perception of herself as a foreigner in France. Perhaps the answer to these questions can be found in the whiteness of the snow, the landscape of her childhood in which Huston's languages murmur.
Keywords:
Nancy Huston; mother tongue; memory; childhood; foreign