Michel Tremblay: Des nouvelles d'Édouard (1984)

Des nouvelles d'Édouard is the fourth volume of Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal by the gay Québéquois writer Michel Tremblay, and for me it was a surprisingly fascinating, often hilarious, read. I say surprising because the initial pages about the ageing Édouard, a shoe saleman-cum-drag queen and the world of the drag queens weren't too interesting for me, until Édouard meets his death by a knife blade in a Montréal street. That's when both he and the book come alive.

Because we go back to 1947, when Édouard came into a little inheritance and went to Paris for the first and only time, when he wrote a diary about his journey and his findings, but intended it to be read after his death, a diary from the dead to be read by his sister-in-law the 'Grosse Femme'.

This is a tale of lies, masquerades, outsiders (whoever they are: aren't we all in some way outsiders?), and culture conflict. A common language links Québec and France, or maybe divides it: after all, French Canadian talk is different, often difficult to understand, laced with English therefore bastardised, but then so are all forms of speech, and who's to say which is better than another?

On the voyage across he meets Antoinette Beauregard – the name of course is an indication of the pedigree, or at least the pretension towards the pedigree – but in any case don't we all pretend to be someone we aren't, as for instance Édouard was pretending to be the Duchesse de Langeais when a drag queen? Why shouldn't Édouard lie and pretend to have read all of the books by (the incidentally gay and sort of mid-way between American and French) Julien Green, the author she's reading? Or pretending to read? And then along comes the Princess Clavet-Daudun, by which time Édouard's had just a gram of bullshit too many, and confesses – in broad French Canadian dialect, really laying it on thick – that he's really just a shoe seller and she may well not be a member of the aristocracy, etc. But she doesn't realise that he's speaking the truth, she just sees him as a brilliant actor. It's a bit like an Eliza Dolittle 'Luvaduck me beads!' moment, but Édouard really doesn't give a shit.

Until, that is, he has to have one in the (unmentioned by the same name) chiottes à la Turque in France, has no toilet paper and is forced to use his underpants. See what I mean about culture shock? That is before more dirt greets him in Paris, before he discovers the minuterie and has to scrabble in the dark, before he discovers there's a rez-de-chaussée before he reaches the first floor, and oh the smells, the lack of en suite accommodation, the crap food.

The Deux Magots café near the Café Flore isn't specifically mentioned, but that's where Édouard ends up late at night with a street map spread out before him, pretty pissed, very pissed off, but a certain Simone (who's with a certain Jean-Paul) is very obliging and tells him which métro to take home. But home is Montréal, not Paris, so after a ten-day journey and a mere thirty-six hours in Paris he's off home. And so a final lie is discovered posthumously: Édouard didn't spend all that time in Paris that he said he did.

A book to read before you die.

Nelly Arcan: Putain | Whore (2001)

There's something seriously wrong with the cover of this book: this is very deceptive marketing. The male hand down the young girl's underpants suggests titillation, a sexy read, although this is anything but that. It's disturbing, written as if in a frenzy, as if the narrator is at the end of her rope. Which is, I admit, an unfortunate way to phrase it because eight years after the publication of this novel Nelly Arcan, at the age of 36, hanged herself in her apartment in Montréal.

This is autofiction: much of the way of life described here was actually lived, and many of the feelings described were actually felt. Arcan went to the Université de Québec à Montréal (UQAM) to study Literature, and she had access to a reasonably comfortable lifestyle because of the prostitution which financed it.

This is not a novel with a plot as such, it's more of a howl of rage against the nature of the world, her parents, and men in general. It's not a comfortable read both because of its subject matter and the style in which it's written: there are no speech marks, the paragraphs are long, and the sentences are very, very long, rambling on and on at the speed of thought, repeating, digressing, hating.

The narrator had a hypocritical religious upbringing, her mother lying in a larval state most of the time, her very pious father having little communication with his wife. And the narrator doesn't mince her words: free from her parents, she sucks thousands of dicks, is fucked up the ass according to the whim of the client, has her face covered in sperm, and the unseen bag under the sink is emptied when it's full of wet tissues and spent condoms. Although some of the regular customers are remembered for their idiosyncrasies, most of them are viewed as if items on a conveyor belt, hungry for gratification, deceiving themselves that the prostitute is enjoying it, that she has an orgasm, that they make her wet. Many of the activities are as play-acting, with the narrator as the key actor, faking sighs, faking orgasm.

And she generalises, sees all women as types of prostitute, sees most human interactions on an economic basis, goes to a psychotherapist who doesn't seem interested in her, envisages the day when she'll meet her father as a client at the door. Her 'friends' are not the students she studies with, but the prostitutes she shares more life history with, with whom she can have a drink and maybe laugh about dick sizes. It seems unsurprising that she frequently mentions suicide in her ramblings.

I was a little surprised to find that not a single book of Nelly Arcan's appears in the Library of Congress catalog, and that the translation of this work – Whore – doesn't seem to be in the British Library catalogue: Putain may make for a rocky ride, but it is undoubtedly a major work of French Canadian literature.

Jacques Godbout: Salut Galarneau ! | Hail Galarneau! (1967)

Québécois writer Jacques Godbout's third novel is Salut Galarneau ! (1967), which anchors the writing more firmly to Québec province than his two previous ones: L'Acquarium (1962) is set in a nameless country and Le Couteau sur la table (1965) in both French- and English-speaking Canada. Salut Galarneau ! is all the more closer to home and largely set in the Montreal area. Here, the narrator François Galarneau has a mobile stall (called Au roi du hot dog) from which he sells hot dogs and chips, although much of the time he spends contemplating, in particular contemplating the book he's writing, which is really the book we're reading here, and which his brother Jacques and his girlfriend Marise have urged him to write.

The chapters are not given titles in numbers or words but capital letters, which added together slightly cryptically spell out (twice) the name of François's 'restaurant': 'AUROIDUHOTDOGAUROIDUHOTDOGAU'. Just to give an idea of the content of the novel, the second R chapter begins, and I translate:

'There's an accident near the bridge.'

'That's three hot dogs?' [Last two words in English.]

'Yes, all dressed.' [Last two words in English.]

'There are often minor collisions on Friday evenings.'

'Do you know where I can buy a cat?'

'The island's full of them, you've just got to ask around.'

'I'd like a really nice one, a Siamese.'

'Sorry, I don't know.'

'OK, bye then.'

'Good evening.'

One obvious point to make here is that weirdness is as common in François Galarneau's world as cats are on the island, but also of course the bastard nature of the language in Québécois life. It's French language (and by extension the life of Francophone people) on an American continent, in a country which is largely English-speaking, which is under examination here. François and his fellow people from Québec are bombarded, largely from TV advertising, by products of American society: Americans have colonised the consciousness of the French speakers (pace Wim Wenders). And for people such as François, this is an existential problem.

It's not just because his wife (and to a certain extent her family) married him under false pretenses, not just that Marise is now transferring her favors to Jacques, that he decides to have a wall built around his home from which he doesn't want to escape: he wants to escape from physical and existential hegemony by another people.

But he's not really going mad, and there's a positive way out of this. Writing, of course, is an extremely powerful weapon, and you can dictate your own terms.

Anne Hébert in the 5th arrondissement, Paris

'ICI VÉCUT

DE 1980 À 1997

ANNE HÉBERT

POÉTESSE ET ROMANCIÈRE

NÉE AU QUÉBEC'

Anne Hébert (1916–2000) also died in the Canadian province in which she was born. She moved to Paris after the death of her mother in 1965. Hébert lived at 24 rue Pontoise, close to the Seine and close to the eastern end of boulevard Saint-Germain, from 1980. In 1998 she moved back to Québec after thirty-two years in France.

 

Link to my other Anne Hébert posts:

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Anne Hébert in Québec city
Anne Hébert: Les Fous de Bassan

Alice Parizeau: Côte-des-Neiges (1983)

Alice Parizeau (1930–90) was a novelist, journalist and criminologist. The title of this book – Côte-des-Neiges – refers to an area in Montréal, the town in which much of the action in this book takes place. Parizeau's husband was the economist and politician Dr Jacques Parizeau, who died on 1 June this year.

 

Côte-des-Neiges begins with one of the two central characters – Madeleine, who is called Mado by almost everyone – as a twelve-year-old at the cinema with her friend Catherine, one of the sourdes-muettes (the deaf and dumb girls) Mado assists in a nearby convent. Coincidentally, I visited Notre-Dame-des-Neiges cemetery in Côte-des-Neiges last year, and took the photos below of a plot of deaf and dumb girls' graves. The expression 'SOURDES-MUETTES' is at the base of the cross in the centre, and I include an example of one of the gravestones, of Anna Sauvageau. Each stone bears the letters 'S.M.' for sourde-muette. Anna died in 1939, which is also coincidentally one of the years in which this novel is set. Alice Parizeau – who was buried in the adjacent cemetery of Mont-Royal – must have been aware of the existence of the plot.

 

 

 

Côte-des-Neiges is something of a sprawling epic covering about twenty years in the lives of two people: Mado and Thomas. Mado is a foundling whose unknown mother left her with one of the sisters. She was breaking rules by taking Catherine to the cinema, but the girls' actions are particularly visible because the place has to be evacuated due to a fire, and Mado is expelled from the convent and has to work for a pittance as a maid to the Pouliot family, in which the husband is a financially very careful (OK, mean) banker.

Thomas is the young boy who shepherds Mado and Catherine out of the cinema to safety, falling for her charms immediately and planning to make her his girl. But this will take some time, and Thomas's job as a telegram delivery boy obviously doesn't have great prospects. And then the Depression comes and his father Adam, a baker, is running into money problems because his customers are asking for credit all the time and he's a soft touch. Thomas travels across Canada, first working as a wood cutter and then making real money by selling bootleg hootch in the USA, then returns home to Montréal with enough money to keep his father's business afloat.

Thomas goes on to run a successful biscuit factory, but Côte-des-Neiges details much more: it is a study of jealousy and independence set against not only the Depression but the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. The jealousy largely comes from Thomas's brother Joseph, who has been in love with Mado for years but who comes back from the Spanish Civil War with one arm less and a feeling of defeat.

Independence is written throughout the novel, although it's Mado's independence that is most noticeable, and in some respects Côte-des-Neiges is a strong feminist tale with Mado taking over the running of the factory during Thomas's unforeseen detention in Europe, which ruffles a few feathers and angers the frustrated Joseph, who sees her as turning into a man.

This is in many ways a riveting novel although a little old-fashioned in its ambitions, which tend to lean back to the realism of the nineteenth century novel. But that's not the main criticism I have of it: throughout, Mado and Thomas show a lack of interest in 'politics', viewing any ideology as harmful: they just want to make money and get rich, as if capitalism weren't a political ideology! The narrator seems to confuse Stalinism with communism, and the final chapter seems to me to lack any semblance of credibility: Thomas can clearly see that Canada – laughably, as he sees it – is now embracing a kind of McCarthy witch hunt mentality, although he has denied that he's a capitalist, and has plans to give his workers more money, provide them with decent and cheap housing, etc. I wasn't convinced: what would Mado say?

Marie-Claire Blais: Les Nuits de l'Underground (1978)

At first I couldn't see in what way Marie-Claire Blais's Les Nuits de l'Underground bore any resemblance to her Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel (1965), although it's clear that the interest is in the outsider, in those who don't have an effective voice. Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel isn't a comfortable read, although I found Les Nuits de l'Underground far less so: frequently, long drawn-out sentences are used, often unrelieved by paragraph breaks, and a French-speaking person from anywhere other than Québec would probably have problems with the pigeon English in this novel.

The pigeon English is used by Lali, an Austrian medical doctor living in Montréal who usually speaks in this variety of English, also using a sometimes slightly tortured form of French. For a time, she's the lover of the protagonist Geneviève, a sculptor who seems to spend her time between Montréal and Paris. (But if Geneviève was so fond of the Brontës she wouldn't have referred – three times – to their brother Branwell as 'Bradwell': surely Blais's error there?)

The Underground of the title is a night club in Montréal where lesbians tend to hang out until the early hours of the morning, and this being set in the 1970s means that the sexual orientation is considered louche, something against the the norm. This is very much a novel of internal exile, a wail against the turmoil of the dispossessed: not in a financial, but in an existential sense.

The expression transformations d'être (literally 'transformations of being') is used at one point in the novel, and I thought of its aptness to this book, which describes such transformations so fluently. This novel is profoundly sensual, it delineates minute changes of temperance, carves out a voice for the sexually oppressed and depressed, and views both the present and the future with a kind of despair.

I'm sure I'll revisit this novel sometime and come up with a different verdict: maybe I read it at the wrong time, but it disappointed me.

My other Marie-Claire Blais post:

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Marie-Claire Blais: Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel

Nadine Bismuth: Les Gens fidèles ne font pas les nouvelles (2001)

Nadine Bismuth's Les Gens fidèles ne font pas les nouvelles (lit. 'Faithful People Don't Make News') is a collection of short stories with the theme of infidelity running through it, but all kinds of infidelity: this is not a repetitious book, but one that experiments with numerous areas of its subject.

In 'Un secret bien gardé' (lit. 'A Well Kept Secret') the title is that of a book that the narrator Élise – a cleaning woman in a huge office block – is reading. It's about a woman who falls in love with her psychologist, and has a secret affair with him. Just as Élise has an affair with M. Séquin in the office block, and whose funeral she anonymously attends. When Mme Séquin asks the name of the unknown mourner, Élise says she was Séquin's psychologist, and that the nature of her client's problems must be kept secret for professional reasons.

And so the stories continue: a bride disappearing for a short time; a hotel worker discovering that his fellow worker and lover is nowhere near as faithful as he believes; a ten-year-old boy stuck on a girl who quickly turns his attentions to another girl who has the hots for him; etc, etc, infidelity and/or jealousy, situations real or imagined. And at the end a faithful couple in which the husband reads news items of unfaithfulness and his wife goes a little crazy: but not enough to be newsworthy. Highly readable all the same.

François Gravel: Benito (1987)

I was finding this book particularly interesting, especially up to the first half. Benito Brouillard (the thirteenth – or fourteenth if you include a miscarriage – child of the family), as his surname name suggests, is something of a foggy character. As a child of such a large family even his parents don't recognise him, although he does his best to hide himself away in any case.

Benito has something of the Forrest Gump in him, an innocent in a world he doesn't understand, or maybe understands too well. He decides to skip school as it's of no help or interest to him, and it's particularly maths that he's bad at: he has an almost total block on numbers. In his truant wanderings he's welcomed by the kindly Adrienne, the local brothel keeper who sees his very young eyes are aimed at her prostitute Nancy, and imagines him as a future customer.

This is not to be, though, as Benito has no interest in sex. He sees his future as designing plaques for trophies, walking in his father's shoes, although his father takes to the bottle big time and dies, leaving Benito with debts that his brothers and his mother are only too willing to have the clueless young man sign as his own. So they leave as soon as the deed is done, with Benito rattling around a huge house, with many demanding letters that he can't understand so ignores.

But Benito has a gift: he can listen. And many people come to tell him their problems. He listens, but doesn't advise, although he's seen by many people as being extremely wise. (There's an obvious criticism of psychiatrists being paid for nothing here.) And his clients pay him with a great deal of food and alcohol (although he doesn't drink), and even pay him money (which he doesn't understand the meaning of). He gives much of the food and alcohol away.

And then Nancy needs somewhere to live and she moves into the Brouillard home on a strictly platonic basis with her daughter Éléonore, whom she's protecting from the life that Nancy's had as a prostitute, and even tells her daughter that all men are out for only one thing and must be avoided, with the single exception of course of the sexless Benito. And Nancy doesn't take financial advantage of this (somewhat autistic) kindly man, becomes his unpaid secretary, regulates his appointments now that he's a kind of professional advisor, and looks after the money for him that he can't look after himself.

Then along comes the sexually innocent middle-class Raphaël who's fallen in love with the lovely innocent Éléonore who now works in a chocolate factory, and initially there's embarrassment all round, but the story still seems to work fine, although... Although the centre of gravity has shifted, the fascinating Benito now takes a back seat in the novel, in fact it's no longer his novel, and the impression I'm left with is just disappointment: what started out as a really promising book just drifts into, er, fog, just implodes. Which is a great shame considering that it started out so promisingly.

Dany Laferrière: Pays sans chapeau (1996)

As I wrote in the blog post below, Dany Laferrière left his native Haiti in 1976 after the murder of his fellow journalist Raymond Gasner, and Tout bouge autour de moi is an account of his return to Haiti in 2012. Pays sans chapeau, however, concerns an earlier return he made: his first in twenty years, in 1996. But this time it's a semi-fictionalised account.

Pays sans chapeau (lit. 'Country without Hat') is a Haitian name for death, a place where a person's hat is never worn. And death is very much part of this novel, as indicated by the local painting Enterrement à la compagne ('Burial in the Country') by Jacques-Richard Chéry on the front cover.

Laferrière's novel describes the exile, the narrator (Vieux Os ('Old Bones')) getting together his mother Marie and aunt Renée (who both appeared in Tout bouge autour de moi), re-joining his friends Philippe and Manu and his former girlfriend Lisa, whom he learns has always loved him.

But the 'real' events described between family and friends are interspersed by dream sequences, so that the novel largely consists of relatively small sections which happen in a kind of dream or subjective world where zombies or Haitian gods exist, and larger sections in the 'real' world divided by smaller labelled ones. But there is a certain amount of merging, of confusion between the 'real' and the 'dream' world. The final section, where Vieux Os visits the other world and meets some gods, is logically called 'Pays sans chapeau' after the title of the book, and the final section is a one-page resolution of both the dream world and the real world.

Dany Laferrière: Tout bouge autour de moi (2011)

Once – on a twelve-night stopover between Miami and Belize – I went to Haiti, staying most of the time in the capital Port-au-Prince ('t' unpronounced). It was a tremendous experience, and has left me with memories as vivid as if it were yesterday. It has also led me to follow later events in the history of Haiti, including its literature. Before saying a few words about Dany Laferrière's memories of Haiti, I speak here of my own.

My visit was in the eighties shortly before the fall of the horrendous dictator Baby Doc (who died last October), when the radio jolted you into wakefulness with a military chant in which the words 'Vive Duvalier, président à vie' are the most memorable. In the heart of the capital the dreaded tontons macoutes policed the streets. And although the people I met openly expressed their hatred of them, I otherwise found very little evidence of open political dissent: indeed, and as Dany Laferrière notes, the people in this desperately poor country were proud of the contradictory opulence of the presidential palace.

The poverty is perhaps the first thing that I noticed on arrival in the city. Tourists have never flocked here, and a white person is a rare sight, a symbol of wealth and therefore a potential source of revenue, and I met a number beggars who approached me with highly elaborate tactics, although those offering to be my guide were more common. I saw wooden shacks that were homes for so many people, and saw a whole family bathing in muddy rain water that had collected in a hollow at the side of a street-cum-dirt track.

I also encountered hostility that was sometimes casual, sometimes malicious: the girl in a slum area in Cap-Haïtien who laughed when my foot got stuck in a gutter and said 'C'est bien fait pour toi' ('It serves you right'); and the guy way to the back of me on the empty road to Pétionville who yelled 'Branleur!' ('Wanker!) at me: I turned to look and he verified the exclamation with 'Ouais, toi!' ('Yeah, you!').

These of course are just isolated incidents, and my memory leaves me with far more positive things. The people smile brightly through their pain and their poverty. If you're lost or in difficulty they'll help you and expect nothing in return. I went on a long, gloriously noisy bus ride to Cap-Haïtien, a sleepy adolescent girl lolling her head on my shoulder, her mother next to her bouncing about with the rough ride and to the sounds of the local Tabou Combo band on the bus cassette, all the time chewing on a huge stick of sugar cane. In the hotel in Port-au-Prince a businessman  from Harlem introduced me to la caille, the local name for the mancala board game: he was wearing a tee-shirt with the logo 'Why worry? Play warri' (another name for mancala), but went cold on me when I bought a far superior mahogany version near the central market for $4, whereas he was selling his boards for $10.

I don't think I need to mention the tap-taps because if anyone knows anything about Haiti at all it's the crazy form of transport there. Dany Laferrière, though, does briefly mention them in Tout bouge autour de moi (lit. 'Everything Around Me Is Moving'), his description of the earthquake in Haiti, which took place on at 16:23 on 12 January 2010: the exact time emblazoned on Haitians' minds. Estimates of deaths vary wildly, but perhaps 160,000 lives were lost.

Laferrière was born in Haiti and had left it long before my visit: he worked on the 'opposition' paper Le Petit Samedi Soir, but emigrated to Québec in 1976 following the assassination of his colleague Raymond Gasner. Tout bouge autour de moi was written from the time that Laferrière returned to Haiti for a Haitian-Canadian literary conference, and just after he'd ordered lobster at the Karibe hotel in Port-au-Prince and started on the bread the world moved and Haiti was thrown into chaos.

The book doesn't attempt to be an account of the earthquake, but simply describes the state of the capital of the country as Laferrière witnessed it at the time of the catastrophe. It is related in episodic form in over one hundred different sections which are not necessarily linear and include his return to Québec, then his return to Haiti again not long after due to his aunt Renée's death, and there's even a short piece about a woman in her sixties greeting him in Montréal after recognising him from television.

I know what Laferrière's talking about here, know both the places he mentions and easily recognise the Haiti he depicts, and I'm fascinated when he describes seeing such Haitian writers as Frankétienne and Lionel Trouillet, although I doubt that a great number of people will experience a great deal from this book, and I'm left with an impression of messiness, lack of coherence. That may be because I've read this short account over four days in between which I've been following the insane activities in Paris. Dunno, but I'm now starting to read Laferrière's Pays sans chapeau, which is a fictionalised version of an earlier return by Laferrière to Haiti. It's described as a novel, and I'm hoping to be more enthusiastic about this one.

Monique Proulx: Les Aurores montréales (1996)

As this is my first taste of Monique Proulx's work, and as there are twenty-seven short stories here – many of them very different from others – I'm undecided about what to make of her.

The title Les Aurores Montréales – translated as Aurora Montrealis in the English version – is an obvious pun on Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, and Montréal is almost a character in many of them. It's also the title of one of the stories about a sixteen-year-old writing a book of the same name.

Six other stories seem to be important ones, being italicised, and all ('Gris et Blanc, 'Jaune et Blanc', 'Rose et Blanc', 'Noir et Blanc', 'Rouge et Blanc', and 'Blanc') can relate to the colour of a person's skin.

A number of Proulx's stories concern multicultural Montréal, immigrants to Montréal, and the differences found in Montréal compared to elsewhere. The feeling of dépaysement (or disorientation, literally being out of one's country and the title of one of the stories) isn't only restricted to immigrants from different countries: in 'Le Futile et l'Essentiel', a daughter welcomes – which isn't the right word but it will have to do for now – her mother to the 'big city' for a short stay, although the day the mother spends on her own there ends with the terrified woman being escorted back to her daughter's place by police officers after being  – hiding and terrified – following a brief subway blackout.

And there's the thorny issue of class or status, as evidenced by the title of one of the stories: 'Fucking Bourgeois'. Then in the penultimate story 'Sans Domicile Fixe', ('No Fixed Abode') where a middle-class guy without any encouragement just gives his wallet to a homeless alcoholic guy and joins him on the carré Saint-Louis (which in twenty years doesn't seem to have changed that much).

I can't yet put my finger on what exactly Monique Proulx is up too, but it seems to be something very interesting, and maybe reading her novel Le Sexe des Étoiles (1987) – which concerns a transsexual – will give me a little more to think about.

Meanwhile, Paris calls to us again.

Jacques Poulin: Le Chat sauvage (1998)

Things seem to be in their place in this ninth novel of Jacques Poulin's: it's set in Vieux-Québec, a cat on the cover, there's a writer (albeit for other people) called Jack who has a (this time relatively new) Volskwagen minibus, there's a mysterious young girl, and there's a search. Hemingway's mentioned of course, although I started to wonder if the title 'the Modiano of Québec city' isn't appropriate for Poulin, although I think he'd have to make a much better effort than with this part-detective story to earn such a title.

Jack lives with Kim although she needs she own space, and they're well both beyond their youth but their ages are only vaguely hinted at. Jack is an 'écrivain public', or public letter-writer, which means he writes people's CVs, speeches, even love letters, etc; and Kim is a kind of psychotherapist who sees clients at all times of the day.

The story proper begins when a Vieil Homme – an Old Man whose name is Sam Miller, although it's hardly used at all – visits Jack because he wants to write to his estranged wife to get her to come back to him. Jack and Kim's cat interrupts the proceedings and the man leaves without further ado.

But Jack's curiosity is aroused, and he stalks down the identity of the man, discovering his name, address, and that he's a calèche driver, showing tourists and lovers round Vieux-Québec. The man returns several times and Jack writes him a few letters, and the man says his wife has replied to the second letter, saying she'll return at some unspecified date in the future. The man refuses to let Jack send the letter to the woman's address.

After one visit Jack follows the man, who meets Macha, a young girl sleeping rough who Jack's had a few brushes with, and who is a keen reader – a little like la Grande Sauterelle in Volkswagen Blues, who also has a way of procuring books without paying. It's le Vieil Homme's son's partner who calls Macha a 'wild cat'.

Eventually, Jack realises that the man's wife doesn't exist, and that the letters are in fact addressed to death, which the Vieil Homme thinks about a lot.

And as for Macha – well, she fascinates Kim, who goes away with her for several days and comes back and snuggles up in bed with Macha, who now seems more like a tame kitten than a wild cat. This, Jack feels, just means he has to pack his suitcase in preparation to leave.

It seems an odd end to the book, almost as if Poulin couldn't decide how to conclude it in a satisfactory manner, but odder still is that I can see no clearing up of the relationship between le Vieil Homme and Macha: what exactly did they have to do with each other? And how were we expected to believe that the man's 'wife' wouldn't have recognised that the letters were in a different person's hand? I'm pleased that this isn't the first Jacques Poulin book I've read, as I think I'd have been disinclined to read any more of them.

Jacques Poulin: Le Vieux Chagrin (1989)

Le Vieux Chagrin (VC) being a novel by Jacques Poulin, there are a number of prominent similarities between Volkswagen Blues (VB) and Tournée d'automne (TA), the other books of his I've read: a forty-year-old writer who drives a Volkswagen (Jack in VB and – as a minor character – Jack in TA); Ernest Hemingway (VB and to a lesser extent TA); cats (VB and TA), the past (VB and TA); search (VB), etc.

The principal cat in Le Vieux Chagrin is the narrator's pet Chagrin, the Mr. Blue of the eponymous translation title, who frequently appears in the book (sometimes with other cats), but has no part in the central story.

The narrator is staying in his childhood home by the Saint-Laurent river and becomes interested, to the point of obsession, in a woman on the coast who has arrived in a sailing boat and seems to be partly dwelling in a nearby cave, where she is reading One Thousand and One Nights and has insccribed the name 'Marie K' on the flyleaf, leading the narrator (occasionally called Jim) to call her Marika.

Leaving messages for the woman to call on him brings the character Bungalow into the story, although she has no information about her: Bungalow has left her husband to set up a kind of refuge for women in nearby Québec city. Through Bungalow the teenaged la Petite, a victim of (unstated) abuse by her step-father, comes into the story, and she often stays at Jim's house, loving the cats and other animals that frequent the area.

The writer's main influence is Hemingway, although he's suffering from writer's block with his love story: he incorporates (by factual distortion) people he's known in his life into the story, although he feels that he hasn't loved anyone, including the wife he's divorced from.

Jim comes to realise, or at least to imagine, that he's in love with Marika and decides to visit the cave again. But the sailing boat has gone, her possessions (including the book) have gone, and he knows he will never see her again. In fact, he seriously wonders if she ever existed, and wonders if she wasn't simply a projection of his female self.

This relates to the narrator (a former teacher) speaking to la Petite about Hemingway's story title 'Big Two-Hearted River', and he asks her what 'two-hearted' can mean. As an example, she tells her a story from A. E. Hotchner's Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (1955), in which Hemingway told of a white owl he shot, but which only had a wounded wing: he nursed the animal, fed it, brought it back to health and tamed and befriended it. From this story, la Petite comes to see the masculine and the feminine sides of Hemingway.

The narrator towards the end states that he has never mentioned to anyone his 'naive ambition', his 'enormous and ridiculous' secret of creating through literature a new world without war or other violence, no competition or hostility to others, everything working towards the service of love. Well, I can understand why he keeps his vision a secret, but at least his actions show his intentions, and his last action of adopting la Petite (whose search for her parents has been somewhat negative) is evidence of it: it's not official, he just writes it, signs it and puts it in an envelope. La Petite seals it and stores it away, watched both by the emotionally moved man – and the cats.

Gabrielle Roy: Bonheur d'occasion | The Tin Flute (1945)

Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion is an important work in the history of the literature of Québec, although the cover of this Stanké edition makes it look like a Mills & Boon type of read. Which it certainly isn't anything like.

The novel is set in the working-class suburb of Saint-Henri in Montréal during the war, where for most men the choice is to sign up for World War II – and fight for countries many can't even place on a map – or stay at home where the depression means they'll probably be unemployed and live a hand-to-mouth existence.

Central to the story is the Lacasse family: the mother is pregnant and has had eleven previous pregnancies, eight children having survived; the father Azarius is full of grand plans for making money, but these plans don't prove successful; and Florentine, who works in a working-class restaurant, provides much of the family's financial support.

Then Jean Lévesque, whose parents died in an accident when he was very young and who spent some time in an orphanage, comes along. He works as a mechanic and intends to become an engineer: for him, there is a third way beyond the starve-or-fight dilemma. Initially Jean shows an attraction to Florentine – who is a mixture of social naivety and natural survival techniques – although this turns to pity. And when she invites him to her home – the rest of her family being away on another of Azarius's moneymaking schemes – he is traumatised: here, he sees the poverty he has escaped from, but he also feels sexual temptation. Although the language is extremely coy and although Florentine is strongly attracted to him, it would be difficult not to interpret what follows as an act of rape.

Shortly afterwards Jean leaves to work in a munitions factory. He had previously introduced Florentine to Emmanuel, a soldier from a wealthier background to Florentine's who has enlisted to break free from the mental and physical prison his unemployed former schoolfriends are in in Saint-Henri and, he feels, become a man(!). He is strongly attracted to Florentine but can only see her during the brief periods when he is on leave. Although Florentine doesn't love him, a hasty marriage will prevent the opprobrium an out-of-wedlock pregnancy will bring, and the change of circumstances will provide Florentine with an escape from poverty.

But as Emmanuel takes the train back to fight with the other soldiers, he refuses to accept simplistic jingoistic ideologies, and can no longer understand the reason for going, for leaving his wife.

Bonheur d'occasion was Gabrielle Roy's first novel, for which she was awarded the prix Femina in 1947. And I still find the English translation of the title – The Tin Flute – an awful one: I repeat, whatever is wrong with the literal 'Second-hand Happiness'?

Below is my link to the Saint-Henri métro station sculpture:

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Julien Hébert's Bonheur d'occasion

Marie-Sissi Labrèche: Borderline (2000)

Marie-Sissi Labrèche's first novel, Borderline, is a work of Québécois autofiction and a paragraph on the back cover clarifies the title a little:

'Je suis borderline. J’ai un problème de limites. Je ne fais pas de différence entre l’extérieur et l’intérieur. C’est à cause de ma peau qui est à l’envers. C’est à cause de mes nerfs qui sont à fleur de peau. Tout le monde peut voir à l’intérieur de moi, j’ai l’impression. Je suis transparente. D’ailleurs, tellement transparente qu’il faut que je crie pour qu’on me voie.'

'I am borderline. I have a problem with boundaries. I make no distinction between exterior and interior. It's because my skin is inside out. It's because I'm a bundle of nerves. I'm under the impression that everyone can see inside me. I'm transparent, so transparent that I have to shout out so people can see me.' (My translation.)

Sissi is largely brought up by her grandmother as her mother is schizophrenic, and kills herself by taking an overdose when her daughter is eleven. But her grandmother is a very poor mother substitute:  when she misbehaves when she is four years old, there are no threats of the bogeyman but of the serial killer.

Her grandmother has come out with so many idiocies that have 'completely fucked my head in [m'ont complètement fucké l'esprit] to such an extent that I feel like an asshole. That's why I'm frightened of everything now: others; public places; enclosed spaces [...]' and the list of fears, which gets crazier as it goes along, continues for almost a page.

Unsurprisingly, Sissi grows up with no sense of identity, no markers, no framework, nothing and no one to cling to. The essential borderline is between her sanity and her madness.

Chapters alternate between Sissi the child and Sissi the young adult. At school she is almost friendless, the other children being aware of her situation and making fun of the way she speaks. As a young adult she screws virtually everyone in her circle, experiments with lesbianism, and in her mid-twenties gets hopelessly drunk at her own birthday party, where she strips naked and starts masturbating on the floor. Câlice, she's an awful mess.

Jacques Poulin: La Tournée d'automne | Autumn Rounds (1993)

In Tiphaine Samoyault's article 'Référence et post-modernité : Jacques Poulin' (Littérature 113 (March 1999), pp. 15–23), she draws attention to an interesting idea that la Grande Sauterelle has in Volkswagen Blues: that a book is never complete in itself, that it has to be seen in relation to other books, and not only those by the same author. What is generally believed to be a book is frequently in reality merely part of a vast picture that others have worked on without knowing.

And not only books may be involved in the bigger picture. Samoyault is interested in intertextuality, and in Volkswagen Blues finds references to forty-four books, two films, three maps, three paintings, nine songs and six newspapers. And the references continue in Poulin's La Tournée d'automne: forty books, fourteen songs, one film, one newspaper and a radio programme.

Culture is very important in La Tournée d'automne, as it provides the glue that brings together the Québécois mobile library employee le Chauffeur (who is never named) and Marie, who has come to Québec city on a temporary basis with a group of travelling entertainers. Le Chauffeur and Marie are both (to take the cue from the book title) in the autumn of their life, both unattached, in need of a soulmate and – probably most important of all – both are in love with books, for which they share much the same tastes.

Le Chauffeur lives in Vieux-Québec near Château Frontenac, and in fact meets Marie as she stands one evening by a railing near the castle by the funicular entrance. He returns to see her with the troupe and talks and walks with her, becoming quietly obsessed with her, as she is with him. One night when they can't sleep he takes her for a ride in his bibliobus over the bridge to and around l'Île d'Orléans, where, as Marie remarks, Félix Leclerc used to live.

And later, when le Chauffeur has to do his summer round of the Côte-Nord, the entertainers decide to follow his route in an old school bus, stopping off at various points to entertain the inhabitants of villages and small towns, making good takings. It's an opportunity for two (very subtly) budding lovers to meet and talk and discover how very similar they are in cultural tastes, even how they use the same words and expressions. (Although, right up to the end, they continue – like Jack and la Grande Sauterelle – to address each other by the polite, rather distancing form of 'vous'.)

And as with Volkswagen Blues, this is very much a road novel: detailed observations are made about the itinerary, the various stops made along the Côte-Nord, and then – when Marie leaves the entertainers to fly back to France, le Chauffeur taking her to the airport, the novel details the continued journey and considerable detour le Chauffeur takes (during which the relationship is finally consummated) as they drive to Godbout, take the ferry to Matane, and go around the head of the Gaspésie peninsula. For a person unfamiliar with the route taken, I'd advise that this delightful book be read with a map to trace it.

But rather than Montréal airport it's just back to Québec, as that's where the journey and the book end. And not – as some readers might have thought – with le Chauffeur killing himself by using the pipe he carries in his glove compartment to attach to the exhaust pipe – but by him asking Marie if she'll join him on the autumn round. And she asks 'Pour le meilleur et pour le pire?' ('For better and for worse?), which veers a little too close to the sentimental for comfort, but the reader is at least happy that le Chauffeur has re-discovered a reason to live, that he'll be doing his autumn round after all, and that he'll have a companion to help feed all the cats they meet on the way.

I just can't understand why for the English translation the decision was made to pluralise the title, as so much hinges on the existence of the one coming autumn round – there's even a prominent allusion to it on the back cover of the above edition.

Jacques Poulin: Volkswagen Blues (1984)

I first read this novel several years ago and found it slightly strange. And although on second reading I certainly find it far less strange, it's interesting that one of the two central characters in it says that people would see both of them as mad if they were expected to believe this story of a chase across two thirds of America following the thinnest and most unlikely leads to find a lost brother.

This is what la Grande Sauterelle (or The Big Grasshopper, called so because of her long legs) states towards the end of this enthralling book, which is only thirty years old but in some ways comes from a very different era. Hitch-hiking drives the narrative: dormobile driver Jack Waterman (a writer) picks up hitch-hiker la Grande Sauterelle and her pet kitten just outside Gaspé in Québec province, and largely through her intuition and psychological skills they come to discover vital snippets about Jack's brother Théo, a man he's searching for after ten or fifteen years because, well, it feels as if his life is collapsing and he needs something to keep him steady. Then (again towards the end) they pick up another hitch-hiker, an old man who finds odd jobs where he can and whose intuition leads Jack to his brother; Jack tells la Grande Sauterelle that the old man thinks he's Hemingway as he says he used to live in rue du Cardinal Lemoine in Paris, he's been to Cuba several times, he loves Key West, and the only house he has had was in Ketchum, Idaho: just a few of a number of references to writers that Poulin seems compelled to mention.

Today the drive wouldn't just not have happened because almost no one hitches anymore, but people merely have to turn to the internet to get information about people they're looking for. But a long road trip (and there are a few mentions of Kerouac in passing) is of course sexier, especially if you're a guy of forty by chance spending the summer with a beautiful half-Indian girl half your age, cuddling up at night in the sleeping bag with her – but then, there's virtually no mention of sex here, the only real occasion being when they hit the continental divide and la Grande Sauterelle strips naked ready for a sexy celebration with Jack, who can only respond by ejaculating prematurely.

Jack (usually just referred to as 'l'homme') doesn't exactly come over as fulfilling traditional masculine functions in this refreshingly feminist-leaning male-written novel in which la Grande Sauterelle not only has the brain power and the sex drive, but she's also pretty useful with a toolbox when the Volks breaks down and Jack is reduced to wiping the sweat from her brow as she works away. So it's perhaps not too surprising that he leaves her with the Volks in San Francisco and flies back to Québec in the end.

Are there any other messages here? Well, it's not necessarily too good an idea to go chasing across the continent after a long-lost brother who may turn out (as Théo does) to have 'creeping paralysis' and doesn't even recognise you when you finally find him. Oh, and Jack thinks that to hook a person into a book you have to start with a brilliant opening sentence: this book opens with 'Il fut réveillé par le miaulement d'un chat' ('He was awakened by the miaowing of a cat.')

I loved the book.

Maison natale de Louis Fréchette, Lévis, Québec

Louis Fréchette  (1839–1908) was born here, at 4385 rue St Laurent, Lévis, where he spent his first thirteen years. A leaflet published in 2001 when the house was opened to the public describes it as a marriage of the neo-classical style and the New England architecture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

'Louis Fréchette naquit à Lévis. Polémiste et écrivain, député de Lévis à la Chambre des communes en 1874 à 1878, il s'établit à Montréal en 1876. Ses recueils de poèmes, Fleurs boréales et Oiseaux de Neige en firent le premier lauréat canadien de l'Académie française. Sa Légende d'un Peuple le consacra poète national. Il y ajouta Feuilles volantes où son art est plus recueilli. Il fut Greffier du Conseil législatif de Québec de 1889 à son décès, à Montréal.

Born at Lévis, Fréchette was a noted polemicist and a poet of some renown. He entered federal politics in 1871 and represented Lévis in the House of Commons (1874–8). Among his significant literary works are Les Fleurs Boréales and Les Oiseaux de Neige, collections of poems which, in 1880, were awarded the Prix Montyron by the French Academy; his epic Légende d'un Peuple; Feuilles volantes which strikes a more personal note; and a collected edition of his poems published posthumously in 1908. From 1889 until his death he served as Clerk of the Quebec Legislative Council. He died in Montréal.'

The north elevation.

The east elevation, facing the Saint Lawrence river.

Inside the house, with a portrait of Fréchette as both a young and an older man. The house is now a cultural centre, with many concerts being performed here. We received a very warm welcome here, for which we are very grateful.

In the town of Lévis itself is La Fresque Desjardins de Lévis, in which the Maison Fréchette can be clearly seen.

And there is also a representation of a young Fréchette reading.

My earlier post of Fréchette's grave in Montréal is here.

Octave Crémazie in Québec city

'LA SOCIÉTÉ DES POÈTES A FAIT

POSER CETTE PLAQUETTE EN 1932

SUR LA MAISON JADIS OCCUPÉE

PAR LA LIBRAIRIE CRÉMAZIE'

A likeness of the head, along with dates of the poet Octave Cremazie (1827–79), are on this plaque erected in 1932 to indicate that Crémazie's bookshop was here on rue de la Fabrique.

And on La Fresque des Québécois, a huge mural in Vieux-Québec, is a representation of Crémazie's bookshop, which among other things, is selling François Ricard's biography Gabrielle Roy: une vie (1972):

François-Xavier Garneau in Québec city

A major figure in the history of the literature of Québec, François-Xavier Garneau (1809–66) is most noted for his colossal three-volume Histoire du Canada depuis sa découverte jusqu'à nos jours (1845–48). He was also a poet and a journalist.

Just off the Grande Allée is an impressive statue of him, quill pen in hand, and in the heart of Vieux Québec:

'MAISON

FRANÇOIS-XAVIER GARNEAU

1862

MONUMENT HISTORIQUE'

'EN CETTE MAISON

RÉSIDA PLUSIEURS

ANNÉES, ET MOURUT, LE

3 FÉVRIER 1866,

FRANÇOIS-XAVIER

GARNEAU, L'HISTORIEN

DU CANADA.'

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IN THIS HOUSE,

FRANÇOIS-XAVIER

GARNEAU, THE HISTORIAN

OF CANADA, LIVED FOR

SEVERAL YEARS AND HERE

HE DIED ON THE 3rd. OF

FEBRUARY, 1866.'

The town of Québec granted Garneau a pension in 1863, and he died overwhelmed by epilepsy three years later.

ADDENDUM: A representation of Garneau on La Fresque des Québécois: