Floating Islands

Three works that bookend Joyce Mansour’s two decades of published fiction

“Floating Islands” is Joyce Mansour’s most personal and unsettling work of prose. Set almost entirely within a hospital in Geneva, this work chronicles the slow collapse of boundaries between visitor and patient, authority and submission, imagination and extinction. What begins as an act of filial duty becomes an existential entrapment, as the narrator is absorbed into the institution’s rhythms and hierarchies.

Doctors and nurses embody a cruel vitality, their health weaponized against the dying. Patients drift through states of dependency, hallucination, and rage. Bodies leak, fail, and betray their owners, while language splinters under the pressure of describing what polite discourse refuses to name. The hospital is a place for arrivals and departures, and it is where Mansour stages her own farewell: “Floating Islands,” her final work of narrative prose, marks an important shift in her creative life in which she begins to look outward, rather than inward, for inspiration.

Rooted in Surrealism yet strikingly contemporary, “Floating Islands” (1973) is collected here alongside Mansour’s earliest prose works, “Julius Caesar” (1955) and “The Parrot” (1956), a combination that reads as both culmination and reckoning: a final confrontation with mortality, authorship, and the limits of imagination.

Joyce Mansour (1928–1986) was born in England to a Jewish family of Syrian descent who moved to Egypt shortly after her birth, where she grew up among the English-speaking elite. After marrying a Francophone Egyptian, she learned to write in French and was forced into exile in Paris following the rise of Nasser. She authored sixteen books of poetry, as well as prose works and plays that confront desire, death, violence, and the female body with startling directness.

Emilie Moorhouse is a multidisciplinary writer, translator, and lecturer based in Montréal, Canada. Her previous translations include Emerald Wounds: Selected Poems of Joyce Mansour (City Lights Books, 2023), which was longlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia.