Second paragraph of third chapter:

— C’est enfin toi, Lucien? lui dit une voix rauque dont l’accent lui sembla tout de suite affreux.

“Is that you at last, Lucien?” croaked a hoarse voice that instantly grated on his nerves.

I’m always on the lookout for actual science fiction set in Belgium, and this is a really interesting example, a reaction to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, which is repeatedly referenced in the text (though I don’t think you’d need to have read it to enjoy this).

Aline is a reserved and somewhat repressed Belgian literature lecturer, and one day waiting for her train home in Paris, the more liberated side of her personality splits off and takes over the body of Lucien, a cute young man who is taking the same train. The (short) book has Aline and Orlanda (as her incarnate other halfnames herself) navigating their identities and relationships through the streets of Brussels.

I really enjoyed this. Harpman writes herself into the book as a minor character, a science fiction-loving friend of Aline’s. The story ends a bit abruptly, but it’s tidy enough given the situation. You can get it here.

I wondered about the extent to which the duality of Aline/Orlanda, and the duality of Aline’s apartment which has two street addresses, intentionally reflects the cultural and linguistic dualities of Brussels and Belgium, but perhaps that is reaching a bit far and we only need to look at the fact that Harpman was a psychiatrist who brought her professional work to her fiction, and it’s rather obviously a story about integrating your personality.

Bechdel pass; Aline reminisces about teenage conversations with her mother in the first chapter. (And does Orlanda count as male or female for Bechdel purposes?)

The book won the 1996 Prix Médicis, awarded to an author who “n’a pas encore une notoriété correspondant à son talent”. Harpman’s first novel was published in 1958, but she took a twenty-year break from writing between 1966 and 1987 (she was born in 1929 and died in 2012). Her best known book is not actually Orlanda but a dystopian science fiction novel, I Who Have Never Known Men / Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes, which I think I must now look out for, though most of her work seems to be non-genre. (I see also an alternative history, La Dormition des amants, which has been translated into German but not English.)

After the disappointment of Moroda, this was the sf book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves. Next on that pile is Dangerous Waters, by Juliet E. McKenna.