Invisible Man at the Window

Invisible Man at the Window / Monique Proulx
trans. from the French by Matt Cohen
Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1995, c1993.
185 p.

I picked this book up at a secondhand shop, as soon as I saw it - I like Monique Proulx's writing but had never seen this one before. It was a fascinating read, a bit unusual and slow to get going, but definitely worth it. 

Max is an artist, living in a run-down apartment building in Montreal. He is inundated with artistic friends, young and old, all emotionally needy and seemingly dependent on Max, who serves as a kind of confessor, and his place is a bit of a flophouse too. People are coming and going, bringing Max news of their worlds as they navigate all sorts of ups and downs, mostly related to love and passion and jealousy and relationships of all kinds. 

Max uses a wheelchair, having experienced a car accident years before. And somehow this makes him into a saint that everyone depends on, although he is not mild or saintly at all. The story is told in a series of  "portraits" of the characters, narrated by Max. And they are all so messed up, so hapless, and Max so very cynical that it feels a bit heavy - where is this going? 

But it is going somewhere, and it's worth sticking with this story. About 3/4 of the way through, Max has a sudden epiphany, an experience that breaks his curmudgeonly self open, and it's beautiful. Then everything starts moving and all the characters come together, the ties between them become clear, and the mysteries of Max's past are revealed. 

The lives of bohemian Montrealers, the meaning of art, questions of belonging and family and love -- they all come together in a fascinating story. Many of the characters are a little unlikeable or prickly or so passive, but somehow this ensemble works and the flawed circle of friends ends up being engaging and memorable. If you have lived in Montreal you'll enjoy the references to places but this is really Max's story and he is the heart of everything - the rest of the details are just icing on the top. I'm glad I discovered this one! 

Medusa by Martine Desjardins

 

Medusa / Martine Desjardins
trans. from the French by Oana Avasilchioaei
Vancouver, BC: Talon Books, 2022, c2020.
208 p.

This is another story of a girl with unusual powers, but this time it's the power to kill men just by looking them in the eyes. It's written by Martine Desjardins, a Quebecois writer I really like; I've read all of her work which has been translated into English so far. 

Some I've liked more than others; this is one of the darker ones. They are all slightly off-kilter, which is what I appreciate about her work. In this one, our main character is a rejected daughter, the youngest of three, who has been called Medusa for so long she can't recall what her actual name is. Her family keeps her locked away, where she never looks up beyond her veil of hair -- her oracular deformities can kill. 

And then her family decides to commit her to the Atheneum, an Institute for young girls with various "malformations" -- an isolated institution on the shores of a deep lake filled with jellyfish. Medusa is so terrifying, however, that she doesn't even become a student, instead being assigned to housekeeping. She is clever, though, and befriends other students even while the school's Benefactors play their twisted games with the girls. 

There is plenty of misogyny and body shame going on in this book, with women's bodies pathologized and most of the men ridiculous and petty. Medusa hasn't even seen her own eyes, being too terrifying to examine. But when she runs away and meets a minor crook who takes her in and isn't afraid of her at all, she begins to feel more agency over her own life and body. And we finally find out what exactly the nature of her oracular abominations is. 

The language in this book is elaborate, intricate, almost Victorian but in a macabre way. We have a very eloquent narrator, who describes her surroundings and the quirks of those around her frankly, sparing no-one. It's a strange story, with ornate cruelties and everyday sadism. But if you like this style of dark gothic with feminist overtones, written in curliqued prose, you'll definitely want to give this a go! 

The Future

The Future / Catherine Leroux
trans. from the French by Susan Ouriou
Windsor, ON : Biblioasis, c2023.
309 p.

The Future, which I read about a month ago, has just won this year's Canada Reads competition. I didn't think it would -- translations aren't always the most popular choices for things like Canada Reads. But it did, and I'm happy with that result. 

It's a dystopia of sorts; more of an exaggerated and hyperextended vision of the decline of civilization. This one's set in an alternate Detroit which was never surrendered to the Americans, and boasts a French community. Which also houses a wild band of ragged, self-governing children. I felt like this was a mix between Lord of the Flies and Peter Pan's Lost Boys, with a bit of Station Eleven mixed in for good measure. And perhaps tinges of Nalo Hopkinson's Brown Girl in the Ring as well. 

There are many, many characters to follow. We start with Gloria, who moves into the house where her daughter was recently murdered, looking for answers, and for her two missing granddaughters. She builds a friendship with the woman next door, and once Gloria encounters the band of children in the deep woods of a local park, they both try to build a tentative connection with the children. Gloria is sure that there is a link to her granddaughters somewhere among these children (and as it turns out she is right). 

There are houses that regenerate from ruins, community gardens built by a stubborn old gardener and his cohort of associates, wild children in various conclaves, poisoned rivers, hit and run tourism, and many more peculiar and unsettling elements to the story. It's a ride. You just have to let yourself sink in and follow the story as it goes. I'm not sure that there is a strong conclusion but there is a sense of hope as some of these children see a new future in cooperation with the adults who work to care for them. The world here is rather vaguely proposed so it's uncertain to me what will come after the end of the book, but there is a strong sense of communities helping themselves. 

I actually liked it much more than Leroux's first book which I read quite a while ago now, The Party Wall. I'm glad to have had the chance to try another book by this author. And I guess many Canadians will be reading it also, thanks to the Canada Reads effect. I hope it finds its audience!

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep / Jocelyne Saucier
trans. from the French by Rhonda Mullins
TO: Coach House Books, 2021.
208 p.

This is another translation from a Quebec author that I kind of liked but also found dragged on a bit. It's an interesting concept: Gladys, at the end of her life, hops a train to leave her village of Swastika and her troubled daughter Lisana, returning to the constant train travel of her childhood -- her father was a travelling schoolteacher across Northern Quebec and her family lived on the train. 

The narrator of this book is a man who is tracking down family and friends of Gladys, as well as anyone who might have seen her on a train, to figure out what happened and why. We learn a lot about Gladys' youth, her life in the weirdly named village and her long-term care of her problematic daughter. We also catch glimpses of why she might have just picked up and left with no notice; there are shades of what she might have been looking for as she searched for a last chance at freedom. 

I found a lot of this interesting; Gladys herself, her past, the idea of train travel as a kind of metaphor for freedom. But I also found the story dragged, like a long train trip that you eventually get tired of and just want to end already. The narrator character wasn't compelling to me, and it was like that conceit just added another layer  of distance between the reader and Gladys' motivations and experiences. It was a lot of telling, and at times the story moves away from Gladys to other elements, which felt tacked on to me, as well. 

So overall, despite the potential I was a bit bored by this book. I wanted to finish it to see if we figured out what had motivated Gladys and how her life ended, but did skim through the last third just to find that out. I might try another book by this author in future though, to see if it catches me a bit more. 

Some Maintenance Required

 

Some Maintenance Required / Marie-Renée Lavoie
Toronto: Anansi, 2022, c2018.
272 p.

I greatly enjoyed Lavoie's two books about a "boring wife" in the past, so when this one arrived in my library recently I snapped it up. It's a standalone, and less slapstick than the previous series. But while it's a more serious look at work, coming of age, and family dynamics, it also has its share of humour. 

It's 1993 and Laurie is at that age where she has to decide what to do with her life. She's attending college but also working , first at a bakery, then a restaurant (her job interview there is quite amusing), and a bingo hall. Her mother works as a parking lot attendant and has made her tiny booth homey. Her father is a mechanic and she visits him at his shop, where she disapproves of the sexist calendars hung up, and where she meets a young man from the rich part of town and a romance slowly begins, giving Laurie a glimpse of a different kind of life.

Laurie also looks after her young neighbour, a scraggly, neglected child who really needs the stable influence of Laurie's family. While her mother is the backbone of the family there comes a point when she is the one needing "some maintenance". The story shows how everyone needs support in life, and how challenges arise that can be met with the help of others. Despite this, nothing feels sappy or sentimental here, it's rough, emotional taxing at times, but ultimately hopeful. 

I enjoyed the sarcasm and some of the set pieces in this story; they made me laugh but also touched me. And I don't think I've read anything lately that engages with work in the way that this book does. The characters spend a lot of their time at work, as people do, and that work defines them and shapes their experiences. I recognized some aspects of Laurie's jobs in the restaurant business from my own few years working in a deli, at about the same stage of life as she's in - it feels unusual to have jobs be a part of a novel in this way. So often a character just floats along and does stuff that isn't affected by income or job schedules. This book feels very life-like in its everyday acceptance that work  - and the finding of work - is a major part of life. I love that it also highlighted how work experiences can also be hilarious at times. 

But the characters are the key here, and this family was the heart of the book. Everything flowed from the relationships between all three of them. I really liked this one, and look forward to more by Lavoie.

Manikanetish

Manikanetish / Naomi Fontaine
trans. from the French by 
TO: Arachnide, c2021.
153 p.

This is a small story about Yammie, an Innu woman who left her community on Quebec's North Shore, and has now returned as a teacher. She has a classroom full of rather disaffected students; they see no future for themselves and are not engaged in learning the French language that she is responsible for teaching. 

This small story moves between Yammie's own experiences both in her childhood and with her current French boyfriend still living in Quebec City and getting impatient with her decision to teach Up North, away from him. That's rolled into the lives of these students that she is beginning to care for, in regard to both their schooling and the issues in their lives. 

Yammie decides that her class will put on a French play, to liven things up and give them a different way to approach French and learning in general. This seems to spark something and the class, even some of the most antagonistic boys, get into it and want to be involved. It brings out new characteristics in some of the students, even while it's not enough to change to fates of others. 

In some ways, this brief and bittersweet book reminds me of Gabrielle Roy and her novels and stories about young teachers in one-room schoolrooms across the prairies. It has the same sense of a young teacher feeling their way with students not too much younger than they are, and becoming a part of the students lives in unexpected ways. The language is also laden with that odd sense of nostalgia that can be found in Roy's writing; in this novel Yammie is telling her story in the present tense, but it feels like she's looking back at it and drawing out the poignancy of her time at the school. 

It's an unusual book, sharing the daily life of a community that isn't represented a lot, and it is told by an author who is a member of the Innu nation. It's one that is worth reading, to get a perspective on a life and a community that can be overlooked in Canadian literature. 

 

Blue Bear Woman

Blue Bear Woman / Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau;
trans. from the French by Susan Ouriou & Christelle Morelli
TO: Inanna, c2019, 2007.
157 p.

Bordeleau's novel was first published in 2007 in French, as the first novel by an Indigenous woman to be published in Quebec. 

It hints at memoir; the main character Victoria is also part Cree and part Quebecoise, and the book is about a lengthy road trip that she and her partner are taking along the roads around James Bay, searching for family history. 

This area of Northern Quebec is remote; the land is traditional Cree and Inuit territory, but from the 1970s to the early 2000s, it was taken and flooded as part of the James Bay Hydroelectric project. This dam and its effects on Cree life in the area is one of the themes of the novel, alongside the uncovering of the very particular family history that Victoria is revisiting. She stops in small towns along the way, running into cousins and aunties and more, all eager to relate stories and expand her memories and knowledge of her mother's family. 

The book moves back and forth between the contemporary storyline and the 1960s, where we learn about Victoria's family from her grandmother's perspective. Victoria is also having vivid dreams of her Uncle George, a hunter who disappeared in the woods over 20 years before -- it seems he wants her to find his remains and give him a proper sendoff. 

Most of the book is slower moving; it's an actual road trip, meandering here and there, finding out little details or re-engaging with distant relatives. Victoria recalls elements of her own personal past, and starts feeling closer to her Cree heritage, mentioning in passing that she's not sure her partner Daniel is really all that comfortable with her spiritual side. 

So the book seems like an historical quest, lots of information about Cree life in the recent past, and the small settlements that exist now. But then about 3/4 of the way through, Victoria's spiritual quest toward shamanism bursts to the forefront and takes over her focus. They meet up with elders and a middle-aged couple who become her spiritual guides. She knows that this development will also help her find her Uncle George. 

However, in order to develop this way, there is a certain plot point near the end that I wasn't convinced was necessary, and also found a little cold in the way it's presented. While I understood why it was there, it took me out of the story a bit. 

Overall, I found this a good read -- really evocative of a time and place, and a strong sense of family connection added to the appeal. The writing was sometimes abrupt, especially in the break between chapters/time frames, and there were a few elements that didn't really work for me. But, it was an unusual focus and a compelling one for the most part. The setting is very strong and carries a lot of the narrative. So definitely one worth checking out. 

Hunting Houses

 

Hunting Houses / Fanny Britt
trans. from the French by Susan Ouriou & Christelle Morelli
TO: Anansi, c2017.
224 p.

This Quebec novel has been on my tbr for quite a while. I first read Fanny Britt's graphic novel Jane, the Fox & Me, in 2016 and thought it was delicate and lovely. So this novel intrigued me. Also, the setting -- Montreal -- was definitely a draw. 

I liked it, but found that it dragged a bit in the structure. It starts in the present with Tessa, a 37 yr old realtor who is a mother of three. She is meeting a woman to list her house; the couple is getting divorced so want to sell quickly. When Tessa goes back to the house to drop off keys, she discovers that the husband half of this couple is her old lover from 15 years before, one whose absence has haunted her even through her marriage. He asks her for a drink later that week. 

From then on, Tessa is in a flap -- she buys a new dress, she imagines running away with him and deserting her solidly loving husband and three boys for a passionate life with this remembered love of her youth. She goes through the motions of her busy life as a realtor and as a parent of three young boys while always thinking about what might happen when she meets Francis again. 

But in between all these frantic ruminations, chapters move back to Tessa's childhood, to her experiences with her best friend Sophie and her brother Etienne, with her divorced parents, and her first meeting with Francis and the short arc of their relationship which has left its mark on her. 

This feels a bit like linked short stories, but I didn't find the flow as smooth as it could have been. This may have been partly due to the fact that I was listening to this one as an audiobook so couldn't flip back and forth to orient myself as the story changed. Also, I found the narrator distracting; she would pause in the strangest places and phrases would be split up oddly. It was a bit discombobulating to listen to. 

What I really liked about it was the initial set up and the pace of Tessa's life in Montreal. I enjoyed the setting a lot; recognizing places and expressions and local prejudices was fun. In the final pages, Tessa and Francis finally meet up -- when they had first met, a shared love of Leonard Cohen was something they remarked on, so here they decide to meet again in Parc du Portugal, a tiny parkette that looks onto Cohen's housefront. I know it does, as the last time I was in Montreal, my husband and I happened to sit in that park and look up at Cohen's old residence ourselves. 

Tessa and Francis, however, decide to have a drink and try to recapture old times. It doesn't work out quite like Tessa had been dreaming; and that final chapter was one of the strongest parts of the book, I thought. I liked the realism of this meeting - the locale, the awkwardness, the conversation, it all worked very well. Everything that had previously been shared about Tessa in all those stories of her childhood, adolescence and married life merge and the conclusion makes a lot of sense. 

There is some sorrow in this book; loss and mourning of many kinds. There is also solidity and strong love shown by a few different characters -- marital, parental, or friendship. I thought that this balance was interesting and appealing. There's certainly discussion to be had in this book, about motherhood, career choices, passion, commitment, self-knowledge, and more. It's serious but also feels grounded in daily life. Overall, I liked it, but I think the setting was personally more intriguing than the main character. 

Madame Victoria

Madame Victoria / Catherine Leroux
trans. from the French by Lazer Lederhendler
Windsor, ON: Biblioasis, c2018.
206 p.

I have been meaning to read this for a year, but finally settled down with it last week and read it in just over a day. It's fascinating -- inspired by the real life 2001 discovery of a woman's skeleton in the woods above Montreal's Royal Victoria Hospital, a woman who has never been identified, this book then takes on the project of giving "Madame Victoria" a history, a life behind the remains.

She creates 12 potential lives for Victoria, all very different. They start out in a likely way, with women who could conceivably be the right age for the skeleton, and have reasonable trajectories that might have ended with a skeleton in the woods. But the stories quickly get stranger and stranger, leaking into the past and into stories that are eerie and fanciful. Finally we even get Victoria the time traveller from the future, who never returns to her origins. 

Interspersed with these twelve lives are a few interactions with the detective on the case, and the nurse who originally found the bones. They bring you back to the framing story, tying all the varying threads together again. I found that this structure worked really well, and the book flowed no matter how different the life-stories were. 

The writing style is literary and graceful, although there is also a lot of energy in it, and a deep care for all the characters. You can feel that each Victoria is being developed as a person, with complexity and a full character; some more than others, but each feels like a person. 

I thought the concept could either turn out very badly, feeling forced, or, it could create something unusual and intriguing. Fortunately, I found it to be the latter. This book really made me think, bringing out a wide range of women's experience and putting difficult realities in view. There was also some lightness and fanciful storytelling mixed in, and I enjoyed the variety while finding that the tone of the book was consistent and all hung together nicely. This was a satisfying read, and I'm glad I finally got to it!

 

A Boring Wife Settles the Score

 

A Boring Wife Settles the Score / Marie-Renée Lavoie
trans. from the French by Arielle Aaronson
TO: Anansi, c2021.
299 p.

I grabbed this book when it arrived in my library -- well, I'd put a hold on it -- since I really enjoyed the first book about Diane and her middle aged divorce, Autopsy of a Boring Wife. 

In this book, Diane is now settling into her newly single life, living alongside her best friend Claudine in a duplex they've bought. Diane finds herself a new job as a kindergarten assistant, and bumps into Guy, the hunky contractor who saw the damage she did to her marital home in the first book. 

She finds that she's kind of a natural at this kindergarten wrangling (lots of opportunity for humour there) even though it's exhausting. Her descriptions of the children and especially their parents is slightly snarky and very amusing. 

And she starts a fling with Guy after many hilarious bumps in the road (one of them being that Claudine's teenage daughter Adele barges in on them in the kitchen just as things are promising to evolve...but Diane gets back at her by surreptitiously sticking a religious badge to her knapsack as she heads off to school a few days later).

There is a lot of angst about her 50th birthday which is coming right up -- and this is the same thing I found odd about the first book. The way that Diane and Claudine talk, and the emphasis on being old which runs throughout this series, is discombobulating when you realize she's only just turning 50. Umm, that's not over the hill or out to pasture yet. 

Just like the first book, this one has lots of musings about middle-aged experiences and how they differ for men and women - from work to parenting to dating again. Diane finds some resolution to her feelings about her ex-husband here, too, which is satisfying for the reader. What I really enjoy about these books is the constant presence of humour, whether that's laughing at themselves or the situational humour that arises naturally; it's kind of like stand-up in the sense of finding what is funny about everyday life. Sometimes Quebec literature can be a bit grim, so I especially enjoyed this book. It's nice to read about a woman surviving adversity and laughing about things while doing so.

If you enjoyed the first book too, you'll definitely want to read this one. You don't have to have read the first one to enjoy this book, but it's a lot of fun if you do read both. This was a great way to start off this year's Women in Translation reading; laughing aloud while reading is always good!

Bitter Rose

Bitter Rose / Martine Delvaux
trans. from the French by David Homel
Montreal: Linda Leith, 2015, c2009.
105 p.

This little book is really more of a novella; it's very short. And impressionistic too, in short chapters examining years of the narrator's childhood. Although Delvaux is a Quebecoise writer, this book feels a bit France-French as well. 

A young French girl moves to a Francophone community in rural Ontario; it's awful, dreary, depressing. Her friends have names like Manon-just-Manon and are generally neglected or outcasts. And girls go missing from this town, too. The years in this village are described with calm detachment, although it's clear she wants out of this dead-end place. 

When one girl too many disappears her mother decides it's time to leave, and they move to a shiny new suburb of Ottawa. The house, the other girls nearby and the lifestyle are described in much the same tone as the earlier part of the book. And after she leaves home to strike out on her own, she discovers that one of the girls she befriended there has also gone missing. 

This is a strange little story. Not much plot, just the slightly rambling discussion of childhood to adolescence to early maturity. The years fly by with a couple of impressions pinning them down. There doesn't seem to a real point to it, and the tone is so detached that I didn't really connect with it. It's a very cool French narrative, but I felt that this theme is one that's a bit overdone, and the style didn't really catch me either, despite the writing itself being very smooth and careful and well done. 

It's like a mix of Quebec Gothic and prairie realism, but unfortunately it left me a bit cold in the end.

Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand

Wash This Blood Clean from my Hand / Fred Vargas
trans. from the French by Sian Reynolds
Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2007, c2004.
387 p.

This book, #6 in the Commissaire Adamsberg series, was of particular interest to me as it is partly set in Quebec. If you haven't met Adamsberg yet, he is a French detective who works on an instinctual level to solve various odd crimes in and around Paris. He's not all that likeable, being dreamy and a bit of a disorganized loner. But his team sees results.

His team is just as vital to the series as he is; his second in command Danglard and the indomitable Violet Retancourt are also back in this one -- I really love Retancourt, and there is a lot more of her here. Quite literally a lot more of her...

The plot is a bit over the top: there is a serial killer who Adamsberg has been chasing down since childhood, since his own brother was accused of a murder when they were young, and which Adamsberg was sure was the act of the powerful Judge Fulgence who was of course above suspicion.

The French police send Adamsberg to Quebec for a training program, along with a few members of his team, and hopefully he'll forget about this vendetta while there. But no... while he is there, a girl is murdered with the same style of trident that is the signature of the serial killer he's been after, a man who apparently died in the late 80s. So what is going on? Is someone taunting him? Did he do it himself, from obsession after drinking himself into a blackout? The local police certainly think so, and he has to escape from his colleagues and continue the investigation somehow. His brother also reappears, and entangles the plot even further. 

This is a rich melodrama, but I enjoyed it. I was hoping the Quebec parts would be wonderful, but they feel a bit more like Bon Cop, Bad Cop than a serious look at Quebec policing. A lot of sitcom level stereotyping going on with those characters. Still quite entertaining to read though. With this series you've got to remember that this is a French series and as such has a little more meandering philosophy in its crimes than a straightforward murder/find suspect plot.

As a read that takes your mind off things and creates increasingly outrageous scenarios, this was a winner. I was amused and couldn't stop reading. The solution was so over the top it was movie material! While I wouldn't say that this is the strongest book in this series, I still found it a good read, and an interesting series entry. The characters around Adamsberg contrast strongly enough with his distracted personality that I find there is balance -- Retancourt's earthy common sense and Danglard's high strung intellectualism add to the mix. 

If you haven't tried Vargas yet, start at the beginning with The Chalk Circle Man and go from there. 

Following the Summer

Following the Summer / Lise Bissonnette
translated from the French by Sheila Fischman
Toronto: Anansi, c1993.
112 p.

I picked up this slim Quebecois novel in a recent second hand bookstore trip. I hadn't read Lise Bissonnette before; she's best known as a journalist and the publisher of Le Devoir in the 80s/90s. But this is what I think of as a typical Quebec novel -- all about small, stifling towns and the struggle for connection with others.

Marie is our main character; she is young, 20 years old, and is spending a hot and oppressive summer sitting in the park knitting, pondering life and considering options for escape. She lives in a mining town with a dying mining industry. Bissonnette describes the pollution in the water, both the look of it and the smell. There's also the fact that most of the men from this town go elsewhere to find work, leaving the young women to end up marrying many of the immigrant workers who will take the crap jobs no one else wants.

She's primly middle-class, described as wearing:

"...a beige dress, dowdy now with its sober flowers, its (genuine) patent leather belt which matches the sandals exactly. Marie is a catalogue image with her carefully waved hair, her discreet earrings."

Then, across the park and into her life comes Corrine, a barmaid dressed in " black slacks and the orange blouse...and hair burnt by a cheap black dye-job", whose loud love of life and sexual openness attract Marie to her despite the feeling that she shouldn't be associating with someone like this. They begin to meet regularly at the park.

Their clothes represent a lot about them. Marie "has been taught beige, white, loose, she has learned parsimony in her choice of clothes for summers that are too brief." Corinne, in contrast, "always looks different, squeezed into tight-fitting blouses, skintight camisoles, slacks that fit tightly at ankle and hips, in blue, green, orange, in black streaked with red."

We hear about Corrine's life as a barmaid and her partner, an Italian mine worker who is slowly losing his mind. Corrine does what she wants, she doesn't take her partner's jealousy seriously, she openly has sex with others, once right in front of Marie.

Marie meanwhile meets and becomes engaged to Ervant, an Eastern European immigrant worker who is different enough to hold her attention. His story of his distant past in Vienna and across Europe enthralls her.

This summer Marie sees possibility -- how she could become a different kind of person, less middle class, more like Corrine or Ervant. Or how she could leave this dingy town behind forever and change the course of her life.

But at the end of the story, it's Corrine who's gone, and Marie who is settling into a life that looks like it will follow the lives of all the other women in this small town. Her youthful dreams of escape have turned to resignation and a vision of becoming just like her mother and all the women before her.

I'm not sure what I thought of this book. The writing was well done, and the structure was excellent. Short chapters read like glimpses into Marie's experiences over the course of a year or two -- her thoughts interspersed -- and descriptive flights that are not flowery, but very realistic and earthy. But it's a bit depressing, and the intense focus, almost obsession, on sex as life, as escape, as vitality, was also a bit off putting. Is this the only thing that Marie can think of that might give her life meaning?

The dusty, lonely, oppressive small town is almost a cliché, and Marie's longing for love adds to that feel. But the writing and the style of this book save it from predictability, and it has a certain something to it that kept me reading. 

Autopsy of a Boring Wife

Autopsy of a Boring Wife / Marie-Renée Lavoie
 translated from the French by Arielle Aronson
Toronto: Anansi Press, c2019. 
280 p.

Forty-eight year old Diane has just found out that her husband is leaving her for a younger woman, because, as he says, she is boring.

But Diane doesn’t feel boring. And as she deals with her new status in life, she proves that she really isn't -- perhaps it was just the settled marriage that was boring. Alongside her best friend Claudine, she explores what it means to be suddenly single after a 25 year marriage. This includes lengthy discussions of the relative attractiveness of middle aged women and men, the state of marriage as an institution, friendship, motherhood, and lawn care.

Yes, lawn care. Among the more serious issues there is a lot of humour in this book. Diane’s wry observations and the situations she finds herself in are very entertainingly told. There’s ribald humour that middle aged people will appreciate; there will be times when you laugh, and times when you cringe while reading this. From making bad decisions about home renovation to crushing on an office mate, Diane experiences a wide range of emotional responses to her new reality.

From shock and wanting to hide out, to not knowing what to do with herself, to starting up all sorts of projects recommended by her friend Claudine, Diane tries numerous things to recover from this trauma. Meanwhile her ex just floats along into a new comfortable life with a new and younger woman willing to take care of him. This book really outlines the experience of midlife divorce, and how it differs for men and women, or for the left and the leaving. 

The emotional journey that she's on carries her through a year of adjustments, some effective and some a little ill-judged. And in the end she finds a new way of living, in a final chapter that feels a little pat or saccharine in comparison with the rest of the book. But it does tie up some loose ends and leave the reader satisfied that Diane is going to be okay, that there is hope for a happy-ever-after even after such an upheaval. 

This book is referred to as a "Quebecois Bridget Jones" in its publisher's blurb, but I don't think that's quite accurate. To me, it is more reminiscent of other Quebec novels such as Colleen Curran’s Something Drastic – another tale of women finding their way after relationships gone bad, told with subdued hilarity. If you appreciate entertaining women’s writing with a French sensibility, this story might be just the one you’re looking for.

Children of My Heart

Children of my Heart / Gabrielle Roy
Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 2000, c1977.
171 p.

Another collection by Gabrielle Roy, this group of six short stories looks at a young teacher's experiences teaching at one-room schools on the Canadian prairies during the 30s. 

Each focuses on one student, though the telling illuminates a larger reality. The stories reveal glimpses of the lives of Vincento, Clair Bright, Nile, Demetrioff, André Pasquier and Mederic Eymard. From Vincento, a recent immigrant terrified to leave his gentle father at the beginning of school, to Mederic, who is in his late teens and old enough that he really shouldn't be at school anymore at all, this teacher sees it all. 

Like most of Roy's writing, this is full of nostalgia and bittersweet observation. It's all remembering, a vision of the past. And while it's also full of love and sorrow and caring, somehow she always avoids the easy sentimental aspect in her stories. 

I really enjoyed the story about Nile, a young Ukrainian who is both good-natured and a gifted singer. The teacher wants to uses his talents to cheer up and encourage the class, and then gets the idea to have him perform for the local nursing home. To get permission, she visits his mother. The description of her visit, and the location of their home, is both historically accurate and viscerally described. The pride in housekeeping that this woman shows for her shack is touching. 

Most of these stories are anecdotes; they start and finish in the middle of things and there is no compelling arc to follow, other than that of the teacher's growing experience of many kinds of lives. The final story is a bit longer, and a bit more constructed, and funnily enough it was only when I got to it that I remembered that I'd read this collection years and years ago. Mederic stuck in my head when I first read this, and I found him again in this final story. 

It's a likely tale; the late teenager still attends school, and becomes friendly with the teacher, after some posturing that she had to manage. But Mederic's father is an embarrassment to him, a crass man who only sees this young teacher as a civilized person that is a good match for Mederic -- as he's obviously too good for the other villagers. Mederic's father is the farthest thing from civilized, that's the irony. But Roy's gentle depiction of each character as they navigate this situation is balanced and compassionate. 

Once again, I enjoyed Roy's work. When I am in the mood for gentle, thoughtful, and skillful writing about people's interior lives in Canadian settings, I reach for her books. Always recommended. 

The Road Past Altamont

The Road Past Altamont / Gabrielle Roy; translated from the French by Joyce Marshall
Toronto: New Canadian Library, 2010, c1966.
168 p.

I picked up this collection by a favourite writer when I was in the mood for something quiet and gentle. And as always, Gabrielle Roy delivered. But this collection also has a bit of an emotional edge, a strong and biting nostalgia and sorrow about the fact that we all age and all die, woven throughout each story.

All four stories focus on Christine, the main character from Street of Riches, which I also loved.

In the first,Christine is six years old when she is sent to spend time with her grandmother over the summer. Her grandmother, a stern woman, is getting forgetful. But on this visit, she makes Christine a doll, and in this long day of focused creativity she seems to be, to Christine, god-like in her ability to make something from nothing. Christine thinks, "For a long time I was haunted by the idea that it could not possibly be a man who made the world. But perhaps an old woman with extremely capable hands." It's all the more of a struggle for her, therefore, when her grandmother comes to live with her family a few years later, and is weaker every day, eventually nearing her end -- understanding that connection between the self as a young person such as herself and the self inherent in her grandmother is a point of maturing for her.

The second story continues with another relationship Christine, now 8, has with an elderly neighbour. He is a charming old man whom Christine finds compatible with her imaginative play -- he goes along with her pretend play and encourages her imagination. It's a long, hot, dry summer when they meet though, and eventually he tells her about Winnipeg Beach at the beautiful lake like an ocean, only a couple of hours away by train. Her mother agrees to let her take a day trip to see it alongside her friend (it was a more innocent time) and Christine and her elderly neighbour (in his 80s) have a day of revelations about life, eternity, and permanence/impermanence. All in Roy's calm, nostalgic style. 

In the third, The Move, Christine is extremely eager to go along with a friend whose father is a mover, taking families and households from one little shack on the outskirts of Winnipeg to another. Her mother thinks this is sordid, but Christine sees it as romantic -- seeing people on the move, making new beginnings and so on. Though her mother says no, Christine sneaks out one morning to go along, and sees that the day's moving is indeed sordid. Sad, exhausting, and the promise of change unmet as the family they are moving goes from one unpalatable circumstance to another identical one. 

And the last, title story, is perhaps the most moving. In this Christine is an adult, driving her mother to her uncle's for a summer visit. They get turned around on the highway and end up in the hills, a seeming mirage in the flat prairie of Manitoba. This recalls her mother's youth in Quebec to her, and Christine sees her mother as the young woman she once was before children and her move to the prairies. It's a bit unsettling, especially as they aren't sure how they got there or if they'd be able to return. A second visit the next year is nearly as satisfying, but a later one, their last, is unfulfilling -- her mother insists that they've missed their secret road, that they didn't pass by the ghost town of Altamont on the way. The impossibility of permanence, of being able to hold on to the ghostly nostalgia that Roy continually evokes in her stories, is presented as part of life and part of maturity. Christine's mother, in her second childhood, finds this distressing; their roles are now reversed, and Christine is the more pragmatic of the two, looking outward to her new life rather than back, like most of Roy's characters. 

The female relationships in this book are so powerful, so deep and convincing. I loved the grandmother's story, with creative making lighting her up again in the midst of her loneliness and incipient dementia. She was strong and independent, and yet susceptible to life's disappointments as well. The mother-daughter relationship between Christine and her own mother is also deep and abiding. There is a closeness there that reverberates through every element of Christine's story. 

As always there are lovely quotable bits -- for example:

And so we lived, rather like everyone else on the face of the earth, I imagine, little satisfied with the present, in constant expectation of the future, and often in regret for what was past. But thanks be to heaven that, whatever happens, there remain always, on either side of us, those two open doors.

All in all, this is one of Roy's strongest books, for me. It holds together thematically and in style, and is really touching, with strong characterizations and a setting that is viscerally evoked. I really loved it.

The Green Chamber

The Green Chamber / Martine Desjardins; translated from the French by Fred A. Reed & David Homel.
Vancover: Talonbooks, 2018.
208 p.

I was eager to read this new translation of Martine Desjardins -- I have read all of her books so far, which have all been translated by the same team and published by Talonbooks. 

The Green Chamber is a little different from her earlier works. It's much less seriously gothic, more Addams family. And it is darkly hilarious from the first page, when you realize that the narrator of the story is the rambling, ramshackle house itself.

The story moves between 1913 and 1963, revealing the lives of three generations in a Quebec family that made their fortune in the first generation, hold on to it in the second, and finally lose it in the third.

But none of it is what you'd expect from a story of wealth across the generations. The characters are all peculiar, with strange names (ie: the three spinster sisters Morula, Blastula, & Gastrula) and have disturbing personal habits -- whether extreme hoarding, obsessive cleanliness or compulsive thrift.

It's dry, archly funny, and bizarre in the very best way. From the backstabbing between siblings in the first generation to the repudiation of greed in the last, these characters are either hand rubbing villians or innocents, with one character who is a little of both (but then she's not family).Vincent (Vingt-cent) and Penny Sterling are the youngest generation, and together they are going to overthrow the past and escape from the constraints of wealth, greed, and hoarding. While the house prefers that they might use that wealth to fix it up a little, it's also very understanding. Commentary by the house on what is going on inside of it, with people who rarely leave, is one of the most entertaining aspects of this tale. Wacky disasters, losses, manoueverings, desires and family secrets all come together to create a dramatic denouement that is foreshadowed from the opening pages.

This family who has made a literal religion out of money faces disillusionment when their god of mammon is revealed as having feet of clay. And the house is left hoping for a restored life when the last remnants of this family finally depart; maybe someone new will take it on.

The style of this story makes it a quick read. It's funny, dark, and original, and the translation captures all the essential Quebec flavour of the setting, an alternate kind of Westmount/Outremont neighbourhood. I can see this as an indie film; it reads like a blend between Wes Anderson and the Triplets of Belleville. Pure entertainment, and I enjoyed this read immensely. I recommend all of her books, and would love to see her read more widely.

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My reviews of Desjardins' other novels:

Fairy Ring

Maleficium

All That Glitters

Covenant of Salt

Am I Disturbing You?

Am I Disturbing You? / Anne Hébert; translated from the French by Sheila Fischman.
Toronto: House of Anansi, 1999, c1998.
104 p.

This little novella by French Canadian author Anne Hébert has been on my shelf for ages! I finally took it down to read it, and it was a quick read, though with its own sense of deep back story.

Edouard and Stéphane are two young friends living in Paris who one day come across a young woman crying as she sits on the edge of a fountain. They kindly go over to check on her, and she finally tells them that her name is Delphine, she's from Quebec, and she's pregnant & homeless. 

Delphine is a bit strung out; she can't stop talking - as Edouard says, words just dribble out of her mouth, she keeps talking even if nobody is listening. Stéphane becomes especially attached to her, and over the next couple of months she becomes a regular fixture in their lives, appearing and disappearing, and telling them about her married lover Patrick Chemin. He's married to a wealthy French woman, and Delphine has followed him to Paris to make him acknowledge her and her baby; she is convinced he will leave his wealthy wife for her. 

As readers, we think we know where this is going, and we are partly right. But Hébert surprises us in the development of the story - at least she surprised me. 

In the book's opening pages, Edouard tells us that Delphine has appeared at his door in the middle of the night with her catchphrase, "Am I disturbing you?" But without waiting for an answer she crawls into bed with him and mumbles away until, Edouard says, he leans over to clear her long black hair off her face and her breathing changes: she dies in his bed. 

That's not a spoiler, by the way - it's on page 4. Edouard then goes back over their history with Delphine trying to figure out how and why sh let her into his very orderly life. Her story, her presence, brings back his own troubled and lonely childhood. In the last few pages of the book we return to the scene in Edouard's room, with the police and ambulance there. Edouard is still feeling shocked and numb; but the last few lines throw his whole account into question. Is he a reliable narrator? I had to reread both the opening and closing again, but I still can't decide what I think. It's a slight, depressing story, but it's also finely crafted and quite ambiguous. Hébert is strong at portraying a character in just a few lines, and so each of these three leads, as well as the various side players, seem real and rounded. But motives are more mysterious. 

This story, though short, is atmospheric, redolent with the sense of a hot Parisian summer, with the exhaustion of Delphine's wandering through the hot streets looking for her lover. The converging storylines are finely drawn, and there is an awful lot in this brief narrative to think about. Though not my favourite of Hébert's works that I've read thus far, it is a story that sticks in the mind, that still has me pondering what *really* happened, and why. It's dream-like and perhaps that it why it stays in your thoughts, with its various images appearing randomly in your memory. Definitely worth exploring this one. 

Nirliit

Nirliit / Juliana Léveillé-Trudel; translated from the French by Anita Anand.
Montreal: Esplanade, c2018.
145 p.

This unusual read is written by a Quebecoise woman who works summers in the Nunavik area of Northern Quebec. She has created a novel in two parts; the first is the narrator speaking to her lost friend Eva, who was murdered during the year the narrator was back down south. In the second she speaks to Eva's son Elijah as he makes his way as a young man without a mother.

The narrator flies north (and south again) like the geese, nirliit. She includes a list of vocabulary at the beginning of the book, and many of these Inuttitut words are sprinkled throughout the text, giving it a stronger sense of place. 

It's a serious novel, with the narrator highlighting both the beauty of the isolated tundra and the social problems found in Salluit. The Inuit struggle to live meaningful lives in the face of addictions, racism and domestic violence, all realities arising from the lifestyle that they've been forced into through government decisions around resettlement and resource extraction in the past. But their resilience and perseverance is also noted, and the desire for education as a way out. 

Focusing in on Eva's life and the repercussions of her murder personalizes the narrative, rather than just being a set of generalizations. Her life, family and friendships resonate throughout the book, continuing on into the ways her son manages once she is gone, with his own relationships and children appearing. Characters are complicated and individual, making their own decisions independently; they are not caricatures. 

The story is based in the author's experiences, and so is told from an outsider's perspective. She acknowledges the problems she sees all around her, but in a compassionate way, in a style that seems to also acknowledge her own part in the situation as a Southerner and Canadian. It has an overtone of recognition and apology, while clearly revealing her deep love for the land and the community, her friend Eva in particular. 

It was not what I expected, but was a beautifully written and powerful exploration of the realities of life in the North for many isolated communities. I appreciated that she spoke from her own perspective and did not try to speak for the Inuit - this is her own story of life in Salluit as an outsider. 

A really different read, sombre and yet with glimpses of light. I think it's important for Canadians in particular to see and understand the lives that our governments have so strongly affected. 


Read an interview with the author at Quebec Reads to learn more about the inspiration behind this book. 

Roy's Garden in the Wind

Garden in the Wind / Gabrielle Roy; translated from the French by Alan Brown
Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004, c1977.
175 p.

This collection of stories really hit me. It's made up of these four titles:

A Tramp At The Door
Where Will You Go, Sam Lee Wong?
Hoodoo Valley
Garden in the Wind

Out of the four, only the first comes from Roy's own lived experience of being a Western Canadian Francophone. The other three take on different experiences - Chinese immigrants to small prairie towns, Doukhobours, and Ukrainian immigrants, respectively.

You'd think this wouldn't work - that there's no way she could enter into these very different lives. And there are problems, both in the way she refers to her characters (ie: Sam Lee Wong is "a Chinese") or the places (ie: it's always 'the Ukraine', not 'Ukraine') But I'm not sure whether much of this comes mostly from the fact that they were written in the 70s, because Roy's extreme empathy does illuminate much of the other storytelling. It's not perfect, by any means, but particularly in the title story I think she captures something essential. 

The first story, A Tramp at the Door, follows the fortunes of a tramp who appears at the Trudeau family farm one day, and worms his way in by claiming he's a long lost cousin from Quebec. He tells stories of the homesick father's extended family, feeding the longing for family news that the isolated French settlers in Western Canada feel for their Quebec roots in all of Roy's work. He stays for a long time, working as a handyman, but then moves on and as the reader suspected, tries this on again with other French families. How the family reacts to this falsity is the true heart of the story, I think, and the conclusion is as bittersweet as expected from this author.

The middle two stories are well crafted, in Roy's quiet style. She represents the size and isolation of prairie towns/settlements very well, and in both of these stories the place of the outsider is often always as the outsider, one who can never break the code and really understand the place they've landed in. They are precise, sad and nostalgic. These stories are also a little uncomfortable for the modern reader, though, as the issues of race or culture and appropriation/representation are much more in the forefront now.

That said, the final and title story, Garden in the Wind, is beautiful, believable, and heart-breaking. The main character is a Ukrainian woman who still lives on her Saskatchewan farm many years after settling there. 

Her children are grown and off to their respective adult lives in other prairie cities, and they are infrequent visitors, embarrassed by their old world parents. Stepan, her husband, is often drunk and often difficult. They haven't spoken to one another in years. Marta's reminiscence is the heart of the story, and as she speaks she shares that she is seriously ill. But why go to a doctor? Why have tests and have to make a fuss of the end of her life? Instead she releases her hold on life, in a way, and stops working and fretting, instead enjoying her flowers that she nurses in the dry and windy yard. She wishes that the stand of poplars beside the house was once again beautiful as it was when it was new and not overrun with broken down machinery and junk. 

Somehow Stepan senses that there is something in the wind, and cleans the yard, tries to keep her flowers going, and ends up feeding her when she settles into bed. All this is so emotionally resonant and so real. I really believed that Marta was a Ukrainian immigrant - she sounds like the people in my own family history, as do all the permutations of her family history and her past. Roy captures the internal life of characters so different from herself, in the smallest and most personal ways.

This story left me emotionally wrung out. It's full of pathos but not sentimentality; Marta is clear eyed and practical, and yet loves the world so much. This story alone is worth reading this book, I feel. 

It's probably clear that I'm really in tune with Gabrielle Roy's themes and her very particular style. If you also love this kind of nostalgic exploration of the past, of small histories passing out of memory, of beautifully wrought, quotable prose, you might like to try her stories out as well.