ALL NETWORKS of possible meaning must be exhausted,"Julia Kristeva writes in Desire and Language, "before we can understandthat they are ungraspable ... that they are `arbitrary` just like the sign, thename, and the utterance, but also pleasure and jouissance." This quotationbegins Kristjana Gunnars`s second novel, The Substance of Forgetting, awork that explores the ways language, writing, and desire both define andconfuse the meaning of individual existence and one`s sense of self. At the centre of the novel is a briefrelationship between the unnamed narrator, who is a writer, and Jules, aQuebecois separatist. The affair begins in an unnamed town in the AmericanMidwest, "a strange American town, and ends when the narrator leaves for aconference in Minneapolis and Jules returns to Montreal. What is known of theirrelationship exists only in the memories of the narrator. From her cottage inBritish Columbia`s Okanagan Valley, she struggles with the possible meanings ofher memories and their representation in language, as well as with her owndesires and pleasures. The Substance of Forgetting isvery much a philosophical novel in which the action is mediated throughcontemporary theories of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and discursive practice.The reader is given few details of what took place in "a strange Americantown ... .. Shall I fill in all the details ?" the narrator asks. "Orshall I let the reader imagine them all?" This is a novel that takes formand narrative as its subject matter; the story is less important than the wayit is manifested in language. Both memory and forgetting are metaphors forwriting: "Unless it is written it does not exist. It never happened."If writing is both desire and pleasure, as Gunnars suggests in this novel, thenmeaning and experience (or its memory) are ultimately "ungraspable"and "arbitrary": "Perhaps we can deny what we see with our eyesand substitute what we see with our desire." The affair between Jules and the narratoralso becomes a metaphor for Canadian unity: "His mouth on mine. A meetingof languages. Unofficial bilingualism. We are defined by our desires, by whatwe want." The meeting of an English writer from the West with a Frenchseparatist from Montreal, in an unnamed American town, is symbol for both the presentpolitical situation and the possibility of Canadian unity. If story and meaning are less importantfor Gunnars than form and narrative, it is indeed by the quality of the writingthat this novel succeeds. By using simple, declarative sentences and sentencefragments, Gunnars has crafted a sparse but lyrical prose that fully engagesthe reader. The themes of the novel are evoked by poetic metaphor: "I havenever seen such fog....No light shines anywhere. The hills are nude and asleep,engulfed in a substance of forgetting." In The Guest House, her second collectionof stories, Gunnars explores literary terrain very different from that of hernovels. In some ways, the stories fail in comparison. If the novels could beclassified as postmodernist, the stories are definitely modernist in theirorientation and execution. Simple and straightforward in tone and structure,the stories concern themselves with characters struggling against harsh andisolated environments. A mood of fatality permeates many of these stories,which prevents the characters from acting upon their situations or developingin any way. Gunnars is at her best in capturing asense of geographical dislocation. In "Mass and a Dance," anIcelandic emigre considers the French Manitoba village she now inhabits: The place she now lived in seemed to hera place without beginning. Without end. Without rise and fall. It was somethingelse. She did not understand the ground she walked on, the air she breathed. Death plays a major role in these stories,and Gunnars is good at evoking its nuances and the resulting sense of loss. In"Water," a journalist remembers a burial she witnessed on LakeWinnipeg: She thought ashes were light as dust andflew in the wind, unable to find enough gravity to actually land. But theseashes were heavy: heavy as lead. They fell into the lake with a thud. The least successful of these storiesadopt a tone of social realism that is both irritating and condescending to thereader. In "`Me Goose Girl," for example, the title tells the story.But even when these stories fail, they are marked by a lucidity and elegancethat make Gunnars one of the finest prose stylists writing in Canada.