ambos » Peter McCambridge

Six for 2016

ambos — Mon, 18 Jan 2016 20:03:23 +0000

6 translations to anticipate for 2016
≈ by J.C. Sutcliffe

Top of my list has to be Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall (Biblioasis, trans. Lazer Lederhendler). I was already looking forward to reading 2014’s Prix France-Québec winner; Leroux’s latest, Madame Victoria, made me even more impatient for The Party Wall.

Madame Victoria is inspired by the true story of a body discovered on Mount Royal, nicknamed Victoria, and never identified. Leroux imagines a whole host of different Victorias, all vivid and all at odds with the world in one way or another. The publisher’s description suggests The Party Wall will be another display of Leroux’s ability to meld an incredible cast of characters with subtle political commentary.

From the publisher:

Catherine Leroux’s brilliant second novel – though first to be translated into English – shuffles between, and eventually ties together, stories about siblings joined in surprising ways. A woman in northern New Bunswick learns that she absorbed her twin sister’s body in the womb, and that she has two sets of DNA; a Mexican American brother and sister in San Francisco unite, as their mother dies, to search for their long-lost father; a little girl in the deep South pushes her sister out of the way of a speeding train and loses her legs; and a political couple learn – after the husband is elected Prime Minister in a chaotic future Canada – that they are non-identical twins separated at birth.

Reminiscent of the novels of Tom Robbins and David Mitchell, with perhaps a dash of Thomas Pynchon, The Party Wall establishes Leroux as one of North America’s most intelligent and innovative young authors.

The Goddess of Fireflies, Geneviève Pettersen’s debut novel (Esplanade/Véhicule, trans. Neil Smith) has been much praised since its publication in French in 2014, in step with a welcome trend of younger Quebec authors who bring an urban sensibility to small-town life. The Goddess is already being made into a film by Inch’Allah director (and highly regarded author) Anaïs Barbeau-Lavallette. The combination of a teenage protagonist and Saguenay slang was no doubt an interesting challenge for the translator, Neil Smith, but the results should be impressive given that Smith’s own fiction crackles with idiomatic language.

From the publisher:

A modern coming-of-age story for a generation. The year is 1996, and small-town life for 14-year-old Catherine is made up of punk rock, skaters, shoplifting, and the ghost of Kurt Cobain. Her parents are too busy divorcing to pay her headful of unspent angst much attention. But after she tries mess – a PCP variant – for the first time, her budding rebellion begins to spiral out of control.

Universally acclaimed as the modern-day coming-of-age story for a generation of Québécois youth growing up in the 1990s, Géneviève Pettersen’s award-winning debut novel both shocked and titillated readers in its original French, who quickly ordained it a contemporary classic and a runaway bestseller.

I’ve only read one of Martine Delvaux books, last year’s Blanc dehors, an autofictional novel based around the author’s growing up without a father, or even the knowledge of his identity. Delvaux’ third novel, The Stuntman of Love (Linda Leith, trans. David Homel), will appear in English this year. Her writing is incisive and insightful, and I’m looking forward to seeing how she handles this love story – or more accurately its autopsy – between a Quebec woman and a Czech man.

From the French-language publisher:

He left her life in ruins. The initial delirium of love and passion deteriorated into conflict, then war. But she is convinced she’s in the middle of a big story, the story of her life. Stuntmen of love aren’t permitted a stand-in, but she has written this book — one last missive sent to the front, the battlefield of their breakup.

In her third novel, Martine Delvaux draws together the frayed clichés of love in a book that is belligerent, angry and liberating. A book that reconciles the accounts of failed love.

In June Christian Guay-Poliquin’s much-praised debut novel, Running on Fumes, will be published by Talonbooks in Jacob Homel’s translation. The consensus among reviewers is that it’s a lyrical blend of the contemporary and the classico-mythical, with a generous helping of road movie. And that English-language cover is intriguing…

From the publisher:

When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, the mundanities of life gradually shift to the rigours of survival. In this post-apocalyptic setting, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometers to reach his dying father.

As the narrator’s journey becomes one of essentials – gasoline, water bottles, and gas-station food – and as the crisis engulfing his surroundings begins to weigh on him ever more, he seeks refuge in a woman, and later, with a fellow traveler he meets on the road. These two kindred souls join him on his path, though they seem to seek a different sort of redemption.

Running on Fumes is a road novel that carries with it influences of the genre, with their storylines of redemption through distance travelled, often in a failing world that reflects the protagonist’s interior. The line that delineates whether the world is reflecting the narrator’s state or whether the narrator’s mindset is reflected by the world is hazy, and there remains a level of uncertainty on the truths the narrator speaks.

Last but not least, a bonus two-for-one, because it’s so exciting and encouraging to have a whole new publisher specializing in Quebec literature in English translation. Baraka Books’ brand-new imprint, QC Fiction, will publish David Clerson’s Brothers as one of its first two titles.

From the publisher:

Frères won the Grand prix littéraire Archambault 2014 and is an original piece of fiction, steeped in myth and fable, a reflection of our own familiar surroundings in a distorting mirror, a world of “monstrous creatures, bigger than anything they could imagine, two-headed fish, turtles with shells as huge as islands, whales with mouths big enough to swallow up whole cities.”

The whole is seen through the eyes of two brothers, the elder brother missing an arm, the younger fashioned by his mother from that arm. The plot is both simple and unbelievable as the two brothers set out on an adventure in search of their “dog of a father,” while the narrative increasingly threatens to turn into at least a bad dream, if not a descent into madness.

The other QC Fiction book already announced is the fascinating Bestiaire, by ludic Quebec writer Eric Dupont, translated as Life In the Court of Matane by Peter McCambridge. Intriguingly, this isn’t the only translation appearing this year to feature Nadia Comaneci, the other being Lola Lafon’s The Little Communist Who Never Smiled.

From the publisher:

Nadia Comaneci’s gold-medal performance at the Olympic Games in Montreal is the starting point for a whole new generation. Eric Dupont watches the performance on TV as a kid growing up in the depths of the Quebec countryside. His parents have divorced, and the novel’s narrator relates his childhood, comparing it to a family gymnastics performance worthy of Nadia herself.

And so we discover what it was like growing up in Dupont’s Cold War Quebec. Life in the “Court of Matane” is unforgiving and we explore different facets of it (dreams of sovereignty, schoolyard bullying, imagined missions to Russia, poems by Baudelaire), each based around an encounter with a different animal, until the narrator befriends a great horned owl, summons up the courage to let go of the upper bar forever, and makes his glorious escape.

The number of books that make the journey from Quebec to the rest of Canada and the anglophone world may be small, but this year’s selection is very high calibre, with these and many more titles well worth checking out. ≈

Patchwork

ambos — Wed, 26 Mar 2014 12:00:46 +0000

a review by Peter McCambridge

A church is built and then burned down in the bayou. A dove pecks at the eye of his dead pigeon companion. A monstrous animal is half-dog, half-sheep. Sons and fathers go off to war. A young, blond soldier in ceremonial dress walks across a battlefield drowned in fog, a dove on his arm. A man on Death Row requests a cup of earth and a glass of water from the Mississippi as his final meal. Crosses burn on lawns. Three “ghosts” loom, draped in sheets and pointed hats, “demons of flesh and blood.” Three who will soon be joined by ten, fifty, one hundred more.

La porte du ciel is a bright patchwork of images, of ideas. It opens with an image of “two little girls under the Louisiana sun, one brown as tea, the other white as milk, the same height, the same frail bodies, barely eight years old, and yet separated by everything.” We follow them through childhood, adolescence, and the American Civil War.

Dr. McCoy, the little white girl’s father, brings the little tea-coloured girl home from a patient’s house, not out of any deep sense of conviction, but simply because it seems like the right thing to do. No more, no less. She is given the name Eve, and grows up with an ill-defined status. Eve accompanies the family to church, but cannot sit with them in the front pew. “She wasn’t asked to scrub the floors, but it would never have crossed anyone’s mind to ask her to sit at the table when they had company.” She takes tea every day with Eleanor, but it is Eve who always washes the cups. And so, when census time comes around, little wonder that Eve counts for only 3/5 of a person, a feat of arithmetic that puzzles her. Might it be arrived at by depriving a person of “their head, their heart, or their soul?” she wonders.

Not that Eleanor’s situation is later much clearer. Grown up and married in her husband’s house, she is treated no better than “half as child, half as guest” by her mother-in-law. Like Eve, she is tolerated, but never quite at home.

The story of two girls, then. The story, even more, of a country not yet a century old, of a “young giant.” A tale of “troubled times” in a “land of madmen.” Of a land “that is a thousand and that is but one.”

“It wasn’t a country at war, or even two countries trying to separate: it was thirty countries loosely held together, by ties that would come undone and come together again, as though the sections of a quilt were suddenly to spring to life and take it into their heads to change place or colour, tearing out the stitches as they moved, trailing behind them useless ends of thread.”

Quilts are all around, woven into the novel’s very fabric and appearing here, there, and everywhere to provide warmth and shelter, as a sign of fraternity among the ranks of the Union.

We hear tell of Daniel Hough, the first man to die in the Civil War. We learn of the Mississippi. There is a long digression about a man on Death Row, and a digression within a digression as each of the jurors is described at length. The effect is to add to the patchwork, not driving forward any plot, but adding colour and ideas, narrated in turns by King Cotton himself, by Eleanor, and even by Eve, writing on pages destined to be thrown into a coffin.

A novel of images, then, dreamed up by a lively mind. And as Michael, Eleanor’s husband, proclaims:

“There are no limits to what the human mind can come up with. For better or for worse.”

In Dominique Fortier’s case, there is no doubt, anything her lively mind has conjured up is very much for the better. ≈

IN TRANSLATION

From La porte du ciel

by Dominique Fortier
≈ translated by Peter McCambridge

One night Eve was awoken by a familiar noise that she nevertheless took a moment to recognize: a pattering sound on the roof, followed seconds later by another, then another still. It sounded as though dozens of fingers had begun to drum against the roof and the panes of the black windows. Tossing and turning in her bed, she closed her eyes and listened to the delightful, crystal-clear song of the rain. The drops began to fall more quickly, harder and harder, closer and closer together, like little pebbles flung down from the sky, and she recognized the sound of hailstones.

She recalled a particularly fearsome storm back when she had been a child, when hailstones as fat as eggs had bombarded the fields, obliterating a summer harvest in minutes, leaving plants cowering against the ground, leaves torn to shreds, stalks snapped, fruit burst open, seeds strewn uselessly all around. Until that day—How old had she been? Four? Five?—she had never seen ice outside of Mrs. Salinger’s. Mrs. Salinger owned a huge warehouse that stayed cool even at the height of summer. Once a week they would go there for heavy, translucent blocks of ice for the cold rooms in the big house, ice that smoked a little in the warm air when they pushed back the straw that covered it. Right after the storm, Eve had gone outside, dumbfounded, to gather the shards of ice that burned in her hand and to look up at the now-empty sky.

An hour or two after the storm, they had found five hens lying dead in tiny puddles, with bloody wounds to the head and body, and Eve had spent the rest of the afternoon with her mother and a neighbour plucking the chickens, gutting and cleaning them, then putting two on to boil and roasting three in the embers, taking care to keep the hearts and livers to mix in with a precious lump of butter to make a pink mousse. They had then deboned the carcasses and thrown the fine, sharp bones into a pot of boiling water until they gave up a jelly-like broth. She remembered her mother’s brown fingers in among the white chicken bones, the way they cracked ever so gently. She had never seen so much meat at once. From time to time, she would gaze up at the patch of blue sky she could see through the window, immobile, innocent. All the while, the heads of the chickens, their throats slit, stared at them with their lashless eyes.

Eve was lulled to sleep by the pattering. She dreamed of smoking-hot pots and clawed feet, then was woken a little later by a drumming much more adamant than before. Thousands, millions of projectiles rained down on the roof above her head. Sitting up in her bed, her eyes wide open, Eleanor listened, dumbfounded. Eve jumped to her feet, raced down the stairs four at a time into the living room, where Mrs. McCoy was standing, paralyzed and silent, and out through the open door.

The doctor was already outside, seemingly indifferent to the rain beating down on him. There was almost total darkness; Eve could just about make out people running in the distance, covering their heads with their arms as best they could. The air was filled with a deafening chirring sound. The rain no longer seemed to be pouring forth from the heavens alone, but rising up from the ground as well; every drop driven by a will of its own. Together they formed a swarm that might have come straight from the gates of hell.

It rained locusts for three days and three nights.

On the first day, they attacked the delicate cotton flowers and the last remaining plants that still bore a shrivelled squash or two.

On the second day, they set upon the leaves on the trees and the cotton plants themselves, no matter how hard they were to digest.

On the third day, they pulverized the tender tree bark, exposing fragile trunks that the ants started climbing right away, in long, disciplined lines.

On the fourth day, they stopped. There was nothing left to eat or destroy. The silence had something of the supernatural about it, after hours spent listening to them chewing incessantly, rubbing their legs together, vibrating metallically. Pulling back the drape, Eve saw them in the fields, glistening and still, as though awaiting a signal.

And then, at dawn on the fifth day, the cloud rose as one and the locusts flew away, blocking out the sun. They left behind them a desolate, obliterated landscape. A blank page. ≈

Canada’s Forgotten Slaves

ambos — Wed, 26 Feb 2014 12:26:09 +0000

a review by Peter McCambridge

The same might be said, perhaps, of any history book, but upon reading Marcel Trudel’s meticulous though free-flowing Canada’s Forgotten Slaves, it appears the historian has two main weapons: the well-chosen anecdote and the revealing statistic. Indeed, this flood of information can be so overwhelming at times that we may catch ourselves skimming over a table and thinking for a moment, “Only two aboriginal slaves in 1696, only one black slave in 1705,” until we come to our senses and remember that it’s people we’re dealing with here, people who were bought and sold at auction like animals.

Canada’s Forgotten Slaves, first published in 1960 and translated into English only in 2013, focuses on unearthing the facts. No excuses are sought and none are made. We learn that slavery in Canada was far less widespread than in the United States: there were 4,200 aboriginal and black slaves in Canada between 1632 and 1834, versus 5,000 slaves in Louisiana in the year 1746 alone. Yet slavery was practiced in New France and elsewhere in what is now Canada, a fact that still may come as news to many. It was this news that led to historian Marcel Trudel being “virtually banished by the Catholic Church” from teaching at Université Laval in Quebec City when his study was first published. As George Tombs notes in his translator’s preface:

“Canadians have long seen slavery in terms, above all, of the Underground Railway, that clandestine network of forest and waterside paths by which Quakers, black freedmen and other human rights advocates smuggled runaway American slaves northwards to liberty in the early nineteenth century. As many as a hundred thousand slaves escaped to Canada. But for some strange reason, while congratulating Canadians for offering refuge to these fugitives, generations of historians maintained a virtual conspiracy of silence about slaves owned and exploited, bought and sold, by Canadians themselves.”

Trudel’s work shows that “men and women at every level of French and English Canadian society owned slaves, from farmers, bakers, printers, merchants, seigneurs, baronesses, judges and government officials to priests, nuns and bishops.”

We discover, for instance, that the first slave we can positively identify was brought to New France by David Kirke in 1629. He might have been from Madagascar, or perhaps from Guinea. He was sold on to a French trader, given to Guillaume Couillart in 1632, and subsequently went to a school run by a Jesuit missionary. He was baptized in 1633, briefly arrested in 1638, and appears in the official records one final time, when he was buried as Olivier Le Jeune in Quebec City on May 10, 1654.

Courtesy Les éditions du Septentrion

And so it goes on, as Trudel – despite the many obstacles in his way – gives names and faces to this steady trickle of numbers. Bishop Saint-Vallier had a slave, we learn, along with the likes of Marguérite d’Youville, later canonized by Pope John Paul II, and James McGill, founder of McGill University… in 1689 Louis XIV granted permission to the people of Canada to own black slaves… two thirds of slaves were aboriginals while one third were black… one slave was acquired in return for a bottle of whiskey… a slave named Joe escaped his owner no fewer than seven times… a certain Louis-Antoine voluntarily became a slave out of love… and in 1798 Chief Justice William Osgoode, based in Montreal, “refused in principle to convict a slave charged as a runaway, ruling that in future he would free every slave brought before his court.”

Statistics and lively details such as these mostly get the better of my hyperlink-addicted brain, while the research and groundbreaking nature of the work is impressive. And, despite an occasionally jerky forward narrative – as Trudel’s many facts, curiosities, and numbers begin to pile up – George Tombs’ GG-nominated translation ensures that the read is virtually always smooth going. Less so, when we pause to consider the issue at hand. ≈

IN TRANSLATION

From Canada’s Forgotten Slaves

by Marcel Trudel
≈ translated by George Tombs (Véhicule Press, 2013)

The most spectacular crime by a slave in New France was surely the one committed by the black woman Angélique (also known as Marie-Joseph-Angélique). She was the slave of a Montreal merchant, François Poulin Francheville, and had been baptized on June 28, 1730, at about twenty years of age: by then, she was pregnant by César, a black slave belonging to Ignace Gamelin. In January 1731, she gave birth to Eustache, and in May 1732, she had twins by César. Angélique then seems to have dropped this first lover for a white man, Claude Thibault.

Yet a cloud hung over this romantic relationship: in 1734 she figured that her mistress, Thérèse Decouagne (Widow Francheville), was getting ready to sell her. Angélique therefore decided to flee to New England with her lover. On the evening of April 10 or 12, 1734, she set fire to the house of her mistress in rue Saint-Paul, before fleeing, either to divert attention from her flight, or in a spirit of revenge. The house soon became a raging inferno. The neighbours realized their own homes were threatened by the advancing flames, so they rushed to move their furniture and effects to the nuns’ residence at the Hôtel-Dieu. But the flames leapt from one house to the next, finally reaching the Hôtel-Dieu, and burning both church and convent. The nuns were unable to save much – this was the third fire to strike the Hôtel-Dieu. The fire continued to spread through the city and by the time it stopped, forty-six houses had been destroyed. During the conflagration, Angélique had ample opportunity to flee with her beloved.

But the long arm of the law caught up with her. Angélique was apprehended by officers of the constabulary, although her lover escaped. She was jailed and tried by the court in the still-smouldering city of Montreal. Her sentence came down on June 4:

She shall make amends naked in her shirt, with a rope about
her neck, holding in her hands a burning torch weighing two
pounds in front of the main door and entrance to the parish
church of the city of Montreal, where she shall be led and
conducted by the hangman of the high court in a cart used
to carry off refuse, bearing a sign both in front and behind
marked with the word arsonist, and there, bareheaded and
kneeling, shall declare that she maliciously set and caused
the said fire for which she grievously repents and begs
forgiveness from God, the king and justice, after which she
shall have her hand cut off and raised on a post planted
in front of said church, and then be conducted by said
hangman in the refuse cart to the public square, there to be
attached to the post with an iron chain and burned alive,
her body reduced to ashes and scattered to the winds.

In the minds of the victims, this sentence was in proportion to the magnitude of the crime: the black woman would first be subjected to the most exacting and detailed interrogation under torture, then paraded in a refuse cart, compelled to make amends before the parish church, have her hand cut off, then be burned alive.

Angélique appealed to the Conseil supérieur, which meant she had to be conveyed to Quebec City. On June 12, the Conseil upheld the death sentence, although it changed important aspects of her punishment: the black woman would still be conducted in a refuse cart to the door of the parish church, there to make amends, but her hand would not be cut off; in addition, on reaching the public square, she would be hanged before burning. The Conseil took account of the black woman’s partial responsibility for the disaster in Montreal. And she was led back to Montreal for the execution of her sentence, at the scene of the crime and in full view of the indignant population.

On June 21, Angélique was tortured in prison in Montreal. She confessed her crime, but only after four bouts of torture, courageously refusing to denounce any accomplice. At three o’clock in the afternoon, the clerk reached the prison and read out her sentence; the Sulpician priest Navetier heard her confession, after which Angélique was handed over to the executioner, likely the black man Mathieu Léveillé. She was conveyed on the refuse cart to the parish church, where she made amends; after this ritual ceremony, the refuse cart continued on to the public square, making a long detour past the burned houses in order to confront her with the magnitude of her crime. Once this funeral procession was over, the slave Angélique was hanged, her corpse burned, and the ashes thrown to the wind.

Meanwhile, the search continued for her lover, Claude Thibault. On April 19, 1734, nine days after the conflagration, Intendant Hocquart ordered the captains of militia to arrest Thibault who was suspected of having set the fire in Montreal along with Angélique. But Thibault had a nine-day advance on the militia captains and could not be found. Two years later, in April 1736, the king authorized the intendant to stop looking for the alleged accomplice to avoid “incurring further costs related to the affair.”

Flesh and Other Fragments of Love

ambos — Wed, 12 Feb 2014 12:46:11 +0000

a review by Peter McCambridge

In Évelyne de la Chenelière’s new play, an adaptation of Marie Cardinal’s novel Une vie pour deux, a couple from France, Pierre and Simone, take a vacation to Ireland. Ireland, land of saints and scholars. The Emerald Isle, more grey than green. Ireland, with “its bloody history and its dead language.”

Pierre and Simone have survived the “old-fashioned, absurd, incomprehensible customs” of “a wedding in white” for their families’ sake, dreaming all the while of an “open relationship.” Over the years they have both practised “high infidelity, closing our eyes and gritting our teeth.” But things changed when Simone got pregnant with their first child:

“We started seeing each other as strange objects.

Yes, of course, a woman, but what do you do with a woman once she’s your wife?

Perhaps, deep down inside, without admitting it,

we hoped to become

what is commonly called

a proper family.”

The vacation in Ireland is meant to get this proper family, this regular couple, back on track. But they are still unpacking when Pierre finds the body of a young woman washed up on the beach. They bring the body back to life in their minds, reconstructing events, reinventing her life together, and now there is a second story, a second couple: Mary and Billy. In this reinvented life, young Mary is pregnant and going to get married. Soon Billy “will be able to say my wife, my son, my house, my car, my fish, isn’t that amazing?” Their son will be born in America, “far from disapproving eyes.”

It remains to be seen whether this washed-up mermaid will prove the couple’s salvation or will drag them under. She at once attracts and repels, representing both the “attractive emptiness” of the hypnotizing void and “a fertile land, a new world, a garden.” At times she brings the couple closer together, at others she threatens to widen the gulf between them. And along the way Évelyne de la Chenelière explores freedom and pleasure, give and take, femininity, motherhood, and childhood.

The play is a sharp mix of imagery and poetic language grounded in down-to-earth events. What, after all, could be more down-to-earth than a struggling couple hoping to get away from it all, hoping for a fresh start? And what could be richer in imagery and more poetic than an “immortal mermaid,” “a white, passive flower, floating eternally petrified in the beauty of her youth”? Throughout, long soliloquies spill over with natural analogies and echoing, self-pitying thoughts are reined back in by tighter, shorter exchanges as Évelyne de la Chenelière walks the line between the language of longing and the language of everyday life.

In Linda Gaboriau’s spot-on translation, as fluent as it is faithful, each word is as visceral as the titles of the fragments that divide the play (Blood and Tears, The Belly, The Tongue, The Flesh…). It makes for an intense read, a play packed full of poetry and profound questions. ≈

IN TRANSLATION

From Flesh and Other Fragments of Love

by Évelyne de la Chenelière
≈ translated by Linda Gaboriau (Playwrights Canada Press, 2014)

MARY

Igot to know blood, globule by globule.
Blood sucked in and blood pumped out of the heart,
its vital course and the many ways it could flow in the wrong direction, or escape,
I never ceased to marvel at all that.
This knowledge made all men seem the same to me.
Why choose one when they are all irrigated by similar globules.
That night, I wanted to lose my virginity.
Make some of that precious blood flow.
Any man would be fine, as long as he knew what to do.
I wanted to join the girls who know.
But they know no matter how much we long to discover the New World,
it’s sadly similar to the one we left behind.
Only our way of looking at things changes,
for a while, at least.
Before long, we admit there is no love in our desire for someone else,
there is no love in our desperate need for someone else,
everything is mechanical.
We get married without love,
we make love without love,
we build cities without love,
we light them at night without love.
There is no love in their countless streets
where we pace and pass houses where there is no love,
where a mother protects her children without love
like a bird roosts on her eggs, without love.
And all that, the cities, the coasts, the moors, the ports, the mountains,
the bleak ties that entangle people,
in all of that, there is no love.
Love doesn’t exist.
Only blood and tears are real.
No love in the doctor’s acts.
Only hygiene, calm, authority.
No love in those endlessly repeated acts,
examining throats, eyes, passive bodies,
feeling glands,
checking for tumours,
there is no love in any of that.
And yet that is all the sick long for,
otherwise they would hide to lick their wounds
and wait for them to heal.
The sick long to be examined with love,
to be told you’ll be all right,
Don’t worry, you’re not going to die.
You’re not going to die.
Not you.
I love you too much to let you die.

SIMONE

(bleeding between her thighs) Pierre! I’m bleeding!
I’m wounded! I’m bleeding.
I’m bleeding the blood of the world!
All of humanity’s blood, drop by drop, month by month,
assimilated in my belly.
The hemorrhaging is endless.
Blood and tears form the rivers that flow since life began.
Long rivers of despair in which the Ophelias of this world drown regularly.
Someone spots something pale in the dark water, then long hair.
I’m sinking!
I’m sinking!
Pierre! I’m sinking!
An incessant seeping forms rivulets, drops, streams, currents, threads, trickles, lumps, bubbles, jets, clots,
fountains of oil, lava, magma,
floods of viscous, milky, clear, thick, warm, murky secretions,
red, brown, black, raspberry torrents,
porridge, jam, jelly, silt, compotes of me,
all of me in this endless tide,
I will spill all of me in long, gushing spurts.
I’m afraid, Pierre.
I’m afraid of becoming dry, parched.
Pierre.
Look how I’m pouring.
Look how I’m leaking.
Look how I’m flowing.
I’m an old pen,
a faucet,
a leaky pail.
I am overflowing,
I’m drowning, flooding.
There’s no saving me.
Help me, Pierre!
Rescue me.
Stop me.
Irrigate me.
Irrigate me,
before I dry up!

PIERRE

You’re so dramatic, Simone.

SIMONE

I’m not dramatic, I’m tragic. ≈

Skok

ambos — Wed, 29 Jan 2014 13:00:11 +0000

Skok en sept temps is a very short collection of traditional Abenaki tales for readers of all ages. Many will be surprised by just how familiar some of the stories are and, consequently, how much overlap there can be between global traditions and cultures. Eve pops up with a snake in the Garden of Eden, for instance, although in this version of the tale, she is called Ep (Abenaki for Eve) and the Great Spirit banishes her from the “vast, fabulous expanse” where she lives with her husband.

Snakes are the common theme that binds the collection of seven tales together. Throughout, the language is simple, with the emphasis very much on storytelling, and there is something to take away from each of the tales.

The illustrations fit perfectly with the text, a gorgeous blend of the fantastical and the traditional, just like the book itself. ≈

IN TRANSLATION

From Skok en sept temps

by Sylvain Rivard
≈ translated by Peter McCambridge

Let us now shift our attention to a time they call the golden age of W8banaki culture. In those far-off days there lived a being known to some as Kloskomba, to others as Kloskabe, and to others still as Glooscap. This important, well-respected individual had created humankind and most animals, and had fought many monsters and giants.

Our hero, Kloskomba, (also sometimes known as the Great Transformer) always had the well-being of the human race at heart and warned the people who lived at the top of a mountain that an enormous flood was coming. But they would not listen and told him they were not worried: The water would flood all the land around them, they said, leaving their mountain an island.

Kloskomba told them the water would destroy all their food, but they replied that they had enough provisions to see them through more than one season.

When the Great Transformer asked them to be good and quiet, and to beg help from the spirits that protected them, the mountain people remained indifferent.

Then they thumbed their noses at him. They took the rattles they had made from tortoise shells and did a big dance in honour of the flood that was supposed to come.

As the rain started to fall, they continued dancing.

The thunder rumbled, but they defied it, singing and shaking their rattles up at the sky.

Kloskomba flew into a rage and at a stroke turned them all into rattlesnakes. And ever since that day, every time they see a human, these reptiles lift themselves up, sway their heads from left to right, and shake the rattles at the end of their tales. That’s how rattlesnakes dance.

The enchantress Pokwjinskwas heard tell of this group of snakes that lived only on the island of Sisikwaimenahan in the middle of Lake Winnipesaukee. She often used songs with her magic and wanted to get her hands on the sound made by the snakes. She went to the island and laid hollowed-out buffalo horns on the ground. Then she sang a bewitching magical song.

The snakes fell under her spell and danced over to Pokwjinskwas. Once they had all gathered around her, she proposed they take the horns to use as wigwams. They agreed and each snake slithered into a horn.

As soon as they were all inside the horns, the enchantress shut them in with a wooden plug. And that is how the sisiwan* was made. ≈

* rattle

Les portes closes

ambos — Wed, 22 Jan 2014 13:00:42 +0000

a review by Peter McCambridge

“Every couple has its pacts, spoken or unspoken,” says Catherine, one of our narrators. “Ours is more twisted than most: I don’t cheat on my husband, he only cheats on me with his models, and then only once, when the painting has been finished. That way it doesn’t count. He owns up, I forgive him. That’s our pact. Sometimes I think it has served us well.”

In a series of alternating monologues, both halves of the couple then go on to examine close to 35 years of marriage. Of togetherness, and of growing apart; of opening up the door to their studios, and of shutting each other out.

On the surface, there’s something comfortably middle class about the years we spend with Philippe and Catherine, two artists still married but long since fallen out of love. Regrets, they’ve had a few. Secrets, too. Their cozy home looks down on Montreal and the St. Lawrence far below, far from the working-class neighbourhoods of Montreal that are perhaps more familiar to readers of Quebec fiction. They eat fusilli with red and yellow peppers and arugula salad. They sip on coffee as they tackle the New York Times crossword. There is talk of travel, and skirts brought home from Stockholm. We are far from the faubourg à m’lasse and pouding chômeur.

This, of course, is no bad thing. All that is remarkable about middle class families is how seldom they seem to pop up in contemporary Quebec literature. As we scrape back the layers, though, problems inevitably creep towards the surface: foundering friendships, betrayal, failing health, a mother who has lost her memory, death.

The theme of infidelity is central to both Les portes closes and Saint-Martin’s earlier collection of short stories, Lettre imaginaire à la femme de mon amant (An imaginary letter to my lover’s wife). But whereas Lettre imaginaire offered such a quick-fire succession of variations on the theme we were often left wondering who was cheating on whom again, and how much we cared, Les portes closes focuses on one husband and wife, with the odd aside from friends and family also struggling to remain faithful.

“Is that a boast or a confession?” Catherine wonders the first time Philippe admits to cheating on her, as he delivers the news to her “like a cat sets down a bloody bird at its owner’s feet.” This duality – both sides of the story – is everywhere, in a world in which girls have grown up “with celebrity divorces and often their parents’ divorces, too. They can’t imagine a party, or a penance, going on that long.”

So, which is it? Party or penance? And who is the victim? As Catherine points out, “There are many of them, only one of me. They move on, I get to stay.” Who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong? Philippe sleeps with his models because Catherine tricked him into having the children he was set against: a first, then twins, to boot! “It was one of the lowest blows of my life,” she concedes. “But not the worst, no, not the worst, just the worst he knew about.”

That’s what marriage is, Philippe concludes, for richer and for poorer, for better and for worse:

“Sitting across from the same person at almost every meal, sometimes as close as can be, sometimes barely able to see her but counting on her all the same, and sometimes seeing her so clearly and hating her so much you want her to shatter into pieces and knowing that perhaps she hates you back. Or that she hated you at a different time when you were looking at her fondly.”

There is a great deal to be fond of in Les portes closes: genuinely profound, well thought-out questions about relationships, characters that stay with us for a long time after we put down the book… In a word, it is impressive. It reminds me of a well-tended garden: considered, but not pretentious. It’s clear that a great deal of thought went into every word choice and yet the writing never feels overdone or self-conscious, just elegant and refined. It’s enough to make you want to call it Saint-Martin’s very own masterpiece. ≈

IN TRANSLATION

From Les portes closes

by Lori Saint-Martin
≈ translated by Peter McCambridge

CATHERINE

Kneading bread, crushing garlic in a mortar, chopping fish and vegetables, searing meat in a great crackling of oil: I enjoy the violence of the kitchen. Fleeting alchemy, devoured as we go. A woman fumes in her big white kitchen, sets down before her family generous portions of rage and rancour, garnished with a sprig of parsley. Many of us have swallowed our mothers’ anger three times a day: the woman beaten by her husband, the woman widowed too young, the woman who has grown fat and hates herself, the woman who has no time to paint… What a coincidence – but, of course, it isn’t one – that such a practical outlet was found for women’s anger, so nourishing, too! Sometimes I can almost pull it off myself.

PHILIPPE

Painting is a largely manual affair. The eye plays an almost negligible role. Plenty of people can see: writers see certain things, journalists others; lovers, madmen, and children all see clearly in their own way. What counts is the hand, the work, the endless patience, and the faithfulness to something we once saw, or thought we saw, and wish to save from oblivion.

Friendships founder, lovers betray, death steps in, and our health up and leaves. But Dürer, Rembrandt, Van Eyck, Vermeer, and Rothko remain. Splashes of colour on a flat surface conjure up space and depth. Painting is indifferent to us, but it does speak. Those who sometimes reproach Catherine and me for not being more socially connected fail to understand that we’ve already made our connection, that that’s what we do every time we hold a finished canvas up to the slow violence of time. What we paint has been; what we have painted will not be forgotten.

≈ ≈ ≈

PHILIPPE

Another morning at the market, another café, more Sunday morning errands, early, before the crowds. We buy the New York Times and divide it up. She gets the arts, I get the main section and travel; she keeps the magazine and the wonderful crossword for later. Routines, unspoken agreements, no need for argument or negotiation. We prattle on about politics, the weather. Aaron’s wife is ill, Pierre is having problems, already, with his young girlfriend. She wants a baby (surprise!) and he doesn’t. The lives of others.

All the things we know about each other, all the anecdotes, all the allusions understood by us alone. Nobody, other than she and I, can remember the bottle of Frascati polished off all too quickly one day during a New Orleans heatwave or the race back to the hotel to make love. Nobody else can remember the cries the children made when they were born, the two policemen, one with brown hair, the other blond, standing outside our door in the middle of the night, soon half a lifetime ago.

I notice how we fold the newspaper and each take up no more than our fair share of the little round table. A courtesy among many others, automatic now. A table, a bed, time after time. Sharing them an infinite number of times – there would be a precise number, but we’ve long since lost count – makes you a couple. It’s mysterious and very simple all at once.

A table, a bed, an old, happy marriage, all things considered.

≈ ≈ ≈

CATHERINE

The only child of a mother with no memory, I envy Philippe and Caroline locked away in his studio. I no longer have anyone to trudge back through all this misery with, but the farther away it is, the harder I work to remember it. In the name of what unwholesome delight, what misplaced pride – I had a gift, nothing can be less expensive than a gift – do I feel like reminding myself that my mother could spend half an hour undoing, one by one, the knots in a six-inch piece of string that “could still be good for something”?

Philippe’s, a family of lunatics; mine, of nonentities. Caroline, in the doorway in a turquoise, pink, and orange dress, a turquoise buckle in her hair, held out both hands to me and twirled me around the way Anna Swann used to, when we were thirteen or fourteen.

I had just the one friend, Anna Swann, and what a surprise she chose me, Anna who had an Ethiopian mother – the only black person in our small town – and a Norwegian father. He had come to run the pulp and paper mill so I didn’t know if Anna would be mine for long, Anna with her caramel skin, her delicate features, and huge mouth, Anna who lived in the big house on the hill, Anna who used to play the piano for me, Anna who loved to read like me, who was exiled like me, the difference being that I had been born there, in this small town with nothing going for it but a mill.

As I remember it, we never played, just talked and talked. Around us was a circle that set out our own private space; nobody came up to us and we were happy that way. Then one day Anna’s mother declared that she needed friends “she had more in common with,” a doctor’s daughter, a lawyer’s daughter, not the little match girl. It was all settled over a cup of tea with the ladies, and Anna’s mother told her: tell that Catherine girl you’re busy, you can’t see her any more. And Anna, the next day, asked me into the little grove that was part of the school grounds, where, beside the fence, lilac bushes grew, and it was there, in among the gentle purple perfume, that she told me. She was such a good girl, and so was I, that we didn’t think to challenge her mother’s orders. As soon as the words left her mouth, that was that. She handed me a branch of lilac she had torn off and turned away.

And Denise and Chantal, afterwards, were everywhere, everywhere. The three of them would walk around, Anna flanked by her jailers. We did try to talk, but they were always there, and so we could only make small talk, and then nothing at all. I ended the year alone.

Then the end of elementary school changed things, and we found each other again in high school. Anna’s mother had given up on controlling whom her little girl could be friends with, or Anna had stopped listening, and we talked again, talked and talked. One day we showed each other our private parts to compare how much hair we had, we bought novels to read and talk about together.

And Anna spoke of distances to me. She had lived in England, in Switzerland, even in Japan as a child, although she could no longer remember. She gave me an atlas for my fifteenth birthday – I still have it, and it has fallen well behind the times – and I spent ages poring over it, each map a possible life. Anna got pregnant at sixteen and her family left shortly after that, I lost all trace of her. In any case, what’s the point in looking for her, catching up, trembling with emotion, and then writing to each other once a year, summing up our lives half boasting, half poking fun at ourselves on a little page that anyone might read?

But Anna gave me an atlas and broke my heart for the first time. For me, betrayal will always smell of lilac. ≈

Déjà

ambos — Wed, 18 Dec 2013 14:00:49 +0000

a review by Peter McCambridge

Roland is happily married. He lives life to the full, trying to juggle his roles as a father, a lover, an employee, a student. Then one day he falls at home. A brain tumour. He’s 30. From one day to the next his life is turned upside down. He’s operated on. The tumour is benign. Then it turns malignant. Aphasia, partial lobotomies, experimental surgeries, and an inevitable slide towards death follow.

And yet the book is all about tone. As the tumour goes inexorably about its work, the author avoids self-pity and melodrama. We, like our friend Roland, go to bed “a little upset.” Because from just a few pages into the novel, Roland is our friend. We care about him, and his wife.

And as the novel goes on, the tone becomes colder and more clinical, dissecting the (lack of) emotions of all concerned. Roland becomes a guinea pig to his doctors, a prize specimen that might earn them a mention in the New England Journal of Medicine. To his wife, he becomes an object that sucks away her energy, something she wants to protect her young son from.

It is a strange balancing act. The novel is set in the 1970s. It is another distancing device and one that adds little to the plot but never seems gratuitous, just lingering there in the background; like most of the novel it just feels right, almost inexplicably sometimes. The writing is not sparse or clinical; it is well dosed and subtle. There are no elaborate descriptions, just well-measured ones, not a word out of place, not a word too many.

This is not a novel of offbeat metaphors; it sticks close to realism, and is all the more touching for it. When reaching for comparisons, names like Graham Greene and Graham Swift come vaguely to mind, though never quite sharply enough into focus for me to really ever be able to pin down why Bertrand’s style seems quite so British, as his publisher points out. Certainly there are few writers in Québec today who write in this style:

“Without moving from his leather chair, Dr. Fauteux watched his patient and his wife leave. When they had disappeared into the corridor, he sank back down into his chair, stretched slowly, and seemed satisfied.”

Certainly at first glance Bertrand’s style appears closer to Graham Greene’s “Wilson sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork” (The Heart of the Matter) than to an Eric Dupont or a François Barcelo, say. Unlike Dupont, Bertrand’s prose is bereft of playfulness; it is cinematic, never melodramatic. And unlike a Barcelo, for example, there is more emphasis on tone and theme than on twists and turns in plot development.

By stepping back from his characters, Bertrand manages to touch on some important themes (the decline of a man, the will to survive, how others perceive the sick and dying, the fragility of the human condition, the absurdity of sickness and death, the physical and moral transformation of a man under the knife, bereavement) without weighing down the book. The novel describes the state of mind of a dying man, leaving the reader to mull it all over in our minds long after we have finished reading.

That said, like the author, I am reluctant to focus too much on these weighty themes. The book leaves its mark through its simple and effective tone. And that is plenty. ≈

IN TRANSLATION

From Déjà

by Nicolas Bertrand
≈ translated by Peter McCambridge

I
Roland was thirty when he started to die.

One day when he had climbed up onto a stepladder to screw in a lightbulb, he collapsed.

Apparently, for no reason.

≈ ≈ ≈

II
When he came back round that day, Roland took a while to realize, not without surprise, that he was lying on the floor. A cold sweat dribbled slowly down his back, then a huge wave of fatigue suddenly washed over him. Worried, he closed his eyes to gather his thoughts, but found nothing more than an unpleasant warmness in his pants, along with a sharp pain in his left shoulder, which had been squashed against the floor. Roland’s head had been thrust backwards, his temple in the dust, and saliva trickled from his soft mouth and spread across the floor. His lethargy had already lasted a long time.

Although he did not immediately understand what had just happened to him, Roland went about standing up as soon as he had gathered himself together a little. With difficulty, he grabbed hold of a piece of furniture that was within reach and, moments later, he was standing. At this very moment, the blood cascaded back towards his brain, making him dizzy. Carefully, Roland walked to the bathroom to wash his face and put some order back into his ideas.

The cold water did him good. Calmer, although somewhat unsettled and rather unsteady, Roland remembered he had a son who, a short time ago, had been sleeping. He went to see how his baby was, and the peaceful look on his sleeping face made him feel better. Reassured, Roland went out of his son’s bedroom and into the living room, back where it had all begun. He dropped heavily into an armchair, took a deep breath, and looked around him. His eyes suddenly fell upon the stepladder in the middle of the room, giving rise to a feeling of disgust mixed with incomprehension. Without further delay, he reached out, picked up the receiver, and dialed from memory, turning the dial seven times to make the call.

It rang for a long time before Mathilde, his wife, picked up. Her husband often called her at work, so she wasn’t surprised to hear the sound of his voice. What he said, on the other hand, disconcerted her.

Confusedly, Roland related “the incident” to her. He had climbed up onto a stepladder, had felt unwell, had landed with a bump. Almost ashamed, he also admitted he had wet himself. Now he was feeling a little better, but he was still nauseous and, given his current state, he wasn’t sure he would be able to manage staying alone with Frédéric.

Mathilde, surprised and perplexed, nonetheless did not let fear get the better of her.

“Don’t worry, darling. It’s probably nothing serious,” she stammered in a tone she did her best to keep neutral. “I’m leaving right now. I’ll be there in a half hour. I love you.”

Roland hung up without a word, but felt comforted. Deep down, that was why he had phoned her: he had wanted to hear her say that he shouldn’t worry.

≈ ≈ ≈

III
When Mathilde closed the door to her apartment behind her, she made an effort to calmly take off her boots and coat before inching her way to the living room where her husband was waiting for her. She found Roland slumped on the sofa, arms lying on either side of his weak body, his head where his shoulders would normally have been, had he been sitting straight, his thighs going beyond the cushion supporting his butt, forming almost a right angle with his legs. His face bore the scars of a violent shock. Frédéric, now awake, was sitting on the floor not far from his father, surrounded by more toys than he needed to keep him amused. Roland had likely plied him with all kinds of distractions in the hope he would leave him alone until she arrived.

During the taxi ride home, Mathilde had felt more and more upset by what her husband had told her over the phone. And yet no clear thought had passed through her mind, as though her brain had been powerless to take in what had just happened.

Without hesitating, she went to sit down beside Roland on the sofa and gently asked him how he was feeling.

“Better,” he replied hoarsely. “But I still feel dizzy, and very tired.”

Mathilde did not want him to explain what had happened an hour earlier: that would have further exhausted him. Instead, she suggested he lie down while she made supper and phoned the clinic. Beset by apprehension, Roland kissed her affectionately, before standing up and leaving the room.

≈ ≈ ≈

IV
Roland and Mathilde arrived a little early for their appointment at the Ahunstic clinic, where Dr. Tessier saw them immediately. After greeting them warmly, the old doctor sat down behind a broad desk upon which his patient’s medical file already sat. He opened it distractedly.

“So, what’s the matter, Mr. Bernard?” he asked routinely, without pondering the meaning of his words.

Uneasy, Roland looked to the floor. He was being forced to revive, only a few hours later, a painful experience he would rather have kept quiet about or forgotten. And yet he had no choice but to hand over to the doctor the clues that would allow him to flush out the causes of his unexpected collapse, a collapse that remained incomprehensible and troubling.

Before long, Dr. Tessier frowned, but kept on taking notes. When his patient stopped talking, the doctor asked a series of questions about his general health. Roland replied laconically that he had never fallen like this before, that he wasn’t taking any medication, and that he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary over the past few days. All things considered, everything was fine.

Dr. Tessier had started to sound Roland’s chest as he asked his questions, and now he tested his visual and motor reflexes. Once he had finished, he went back to sit at his desk, scratching his chin.

“Everything appears to be normal,” he said, shaking his head. “I have trouble seeing why you might have lost consciousness… This unexpected loss of consciousness can likely be put down to overexertion or stress, although it may have been caused (the doctor stressed the word may) by an illness that cannot be detected by a basic medical examination. To be sure, we will need a blood sample, and analyzing it will take a few days. We’ll know more about what might have caused your episode after that. Until then: complete rest!”

Although he had a bad feeling in his heart of hearts, the doctor spoke frankly and objectively. He tried hard, however, to end on an optimistic note:

“Rest assured there is no reason to worry for the time being,” he said in a firm tone that sought to be reassuring. The doctor then signed him off on sick leave for one week, prescribed him tablets, and urged him to get some rest, to relax. He also asked that Mathilde stay with him over this period, until the next appointment.

His prescription in hand, Roland walked nonchalantly through the door of the doctor’s office, still shaken by this unbelievable day. Mathilde was about to do the same when the doctor, hurrying after her, took her by the arm.

“If ever your husband should lose consciousness again,” he said in a low voice, “don’t hesitate for a second: call an ambulance at once.” ≈

Nova

ambos — Wed, 04 Dec 2013 13:35:45 +0000

Le Quartanier is one of the most exciting publishers in Quebec today, home to a growing roster of often young writers. The books cut a wide swathe, yet there is coherence: every title shares something, but it’s very hard to put a finger on what that something is.

The Nova series, released to celebrate Le Quartanier’s tenth birthday, is ten pocket-sized novellas with gorgeous three-colour covers by Catherine D’Amours of the Pointbarre collective. Available individually or in a limited-edition boxed set, these books are a welcome treat for Le Quartanier’s fans and a great way to discover ten authors and a publisher that’s always worth watching. ≈

Quinze pour cent, by Samuel Archibald

I STARTED READING Quinze pour cent on the plane. A short twenty-minute hop later, I was already halfway through. I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans on the way to my connecting flight, and turned the last page right after the captain switched off the seatbelt sign. Talk about a great format for reading on the go.

Samuel Archibald’s foray into the police procedural makes for a stimulating read. Inspector Mario Leroux answers the call to a home invasion gone horribly wrong at a remote cottage by Lac Saint-Jean. In spite of Leroux’s paranoia of losing his memory – every morning he has to remind himself of who he is, where he’s from, and what his girlfriend does for a living – his instinct for sniffing out guilt and innocence never fails. Needless to say, it doesn’t take him long to figure out what happened and who is responsible. What else is there to say about Leroux? Woe betide any officer on his team who entertains a theory. Leroux is an old-school, methodical detective who gets things done through good old-fashioned legwork. With Quinze pour cent, Archibald injects a healthy dose of humour and artful description into a mere 68 pages. If reading a full-length detective novel were a good night’s sleep, this would be a power nap: just enough to keep you going and whet your appetite for more.

- David Warriner

Rosemont de profil, by Raymond Bock

IT’S HARD TO RESIST a good first-person interior narrative by a bookish loner and occasional flâneur, particularly with episodes of physical comedy to sparkle against the otherwise rather formal whole. The tone of Rosemont de profil is disarmingly smooth but also serious; the sensibility often laconic yet with a pointed hint of underlying deviance. Part exploration of a neighbourhood, part excavation of a relationship and a past that now seem virtually incomprehensible, the novella opens with the narrator, Sylvain, remembering his exhilarating childhood friendship with Julien. They meet at swimming club and quickly becoming “an out-of-control pair of nasty little brats, the kind I’d want to smack on sight nowadays.” The boys’ escapades, by turns hilarious and disturbing, demonstrate the casual cruelty of children and the power of peer pressure. When Sylvain’s parents move away from their Rosemont neighbourhood the friendship, already cooling on Julien’s part, is over.

For the next decade or two Sylvain plods on, working out what he wants to do in a rambling, haphazard way and nurturing a feeling somewhere between indifference and bitterness about life. After being convinced by his family to join Facebook, he reports, “My virtual friends were no more numerous than my real friends, of which I had precisely none.” One day Julien sends him a friend request and then invites him for dinner. Sylvain soon regrets accepting. Travelling through the old neighbourhood to Julien’s house, he puts off their meeting as long as possible. The ending takes an unexpected turn that focuses on neither of the men but puts into high relief the sheer raw emotion of the narrator, which here breaks through the artful tone of the rest of the story and with great skill leaves the reader feeling, uncomfortably, like a voyeur.

- J.C. Sutcliffe

Les mines générales, by Daniel Grenier

FROM THE OUTSET of this novella, named after the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, the atmosphere is laid back as a bossa nova. The narrator is severely eccentric, borderline antisocial given the extent to which his passion for the Portuguese language dominates his life. He meets a man – a lusophone of course – on the bus in Montreal. Soon he is best of friends with this man, his wife, and their two children, to the point where the family, who have money problems, move in with him. Our narrator couldn’t be happier; his girlfriend, who soon tires of her boyfriend’s exotic new accent, not so much.

This book isn’t about the story, which travels well-worn, even sentimental paths. It’s about the narrator, who we come to see for what he is, mostly through his speech. In taking in the family and offering help he seems to exhibit the best of intentions, but we soon see that he’s driven by his own personal quest to be immersed in an adopted culture. As readers we go along for the ride as his long-cherished dream comes true, since, joy of joys, the family takes him to spend the Holidays with them in Brazil. “It smelled like coconuts, and toucans, and ice-cold Brahma.” Between his superficiality and his desire to experience his deepest passion, the narrator brings us on board for a journey to the end of this all-consuming fervor. It’s a great read, proof that Grenier has the talent to go far. Or as his narrator would proudly say, legal, man, it’s all legal.

- Josée-Anne Paradis (trans. P.S.)

À la morte saison, by David Leblanc

BLEAK. CALCULATED. APOCALYPTIC. POETIC. David Leblanc’s À la morte saison is all of these things. Dense, too: it feels much longer than its 38 pages. And yet not much happens. The novella opens with a bold “The explosion tore half his face off” and that’s pretty much that in terms of the action.

It’s not the destination that counts, we’ve all learned. Getting there is part of the fun. In this short book, from the outset we know that what follows is nothing more than one long “What if?” So there better be plenty to see as we look out the window along the way, right?

As it happens, we get to see a corpse staggering through a desolate landscape. Or rather what we imagine would happen were the corpse to stand up and strike out for the “stinking city” ahead of him, a bird of prey circling above acting as a rare “encouraging” sign of life along the way. Sentence fragments, ideas, and uncommon words echo throughout the book. Matter-of-fact sentences mix with a much higher register. The effect is destabilizing, with the odd back-and-forth between first- and third-person narrative. As readers, it often feels as though we’re on a gruelling journey where it’s one step forward, two steps back.

- Peter McCambridge

L’été 95, by Sophie Létourneau

IN L’ÉTÉ 95, Sophie Létourneau’s protagonist, Sara, returns to Quebec City after a long absence. She’s been abroad, living in Japan, working as a journalist, and now she’s back with a cameraman, Tetsuo, to cover the student protests. As she takes him on a tour of the capital city’s sites, Tetsuo asks her, “Is Quebec foreign or home to you?” Sara, who is half-Japanese, half-Québécoise, answers, “Both.”

The duality present in Sara’s character is echoed in the book’s narrative as its chapters flutter back and forth between past and present. We trace the course of Sara’s memories as she travels through the city and along the Saint Lawrence, outwardly acting as informal guide to Tetsuo, inwardly unravelling accounts of her adolescence. While the aspects of her story are certainly compelling in their present tense, there is a gripping vivacity to Sara’s recollections. Sara details such teen exploits as skipping school, taking acid, and sneaking into bars in sequences as lyrically succinct as prose poems.

It soon becomes evident that these episodes, addressed to a “you,” serve as a kind of in memoriam: Sara’s memories reconstruct or resurrect her friendship with a girl she loved, who died. “It’s the summer of ‘95. Nothing is broken yet. You’re still alive, dangerously alive.”

- Melissa Bull

Royauté, by Alexie Morin

IMPRESSIONISTIC to stream-of-consciousness, dark to disturbing. Rhythmic prose, polished and smoothed. A filmmaker, fandom, obsession. Events accrete but don’t add up. Sex, violence. Wasps. A city. A country childhood, loggers and mechanics, runaway, wrong turn, run, woods, caught, crushing blow. Tears. Little structure, more flux; feeling, mood, tone – shrouded in a haze. Royalty.

- Pablo Strauss

Ristigouche, by Éric Plamondon

RISTIGOUCHE FEELS at once familiar and deeper than all of us. Éric Plamondon, author of the award-winning novels that make up 1984, here offers up a short, bittersweet delight that is something of an antidote to the relentless tour de force of his trilogy.

Ristigouche is the story of a man at a crossroads who heads to the mouth of the Restigouche River in the Baie des Chaleurs to go salmon fishing for the first time—because “to be a real fisherman, you had to catch a salmon at least once in your life.” His wife gone and his mother buried, Pierre must face the semi-metaphorical whale that traps him. He must face his indolence; “he could have stayed in bed all day. With this whale on his plexus, he didn’t have much of a choice.”

The novella’s biblical undertones are subtle – we all feel biblical in our grief – and counterpointed with history and lore, from a failed last-ditch attempt to save North America for France, all white flags and shipwrecks, to a pillage-happy Acadian governor, to the story of a Mi’kmaq girl who dips her finger in the water each morning to call the white whales, and with interspersed verses of folk song.

Back in the land of reality, the quest becomes saving a beached beluga at the mouth of the titular river. Ristigouche is about redemption; it is full of doubt, it is about whom we come from and where we drop anchor. Kudos to Le Quartanier for the small, good bite – the novella feels whole, and Plamondon, as always, both luminous and satisfyingly shadowy.

- Katia Grubisic

Les singes de Gandhi, by Patrick Roy

READING THE OPENING pages of Patrick Roy’s Les singes de Gandhi is as close as one can possibly get to stepping off a plane and into the teeming, sweating, crackling streets of Mumbai. It’s a commonplace that books transport us “into the thick of the action,” but nowhere have I experienced this more profoundly than here.

Roy effortlessly guides us through a month-long trip to India, beginning with a short stint in Mumbai (smelly and crowded), down to the beaches of Goa (Eden on Earth), a short flight up to Jaipur (worth it for the monkeys), then over to Bharatpur (don’t bother), stopping in Agra (for the Taj Mahal), and ending in Delhi. The narrator spends less time describing how he spends each day than he does on the people he spends them with: Radu the taxi driver, Matthew the watier, Picazz the shopkeeper, Seera the king of the monkeys.

Read Les singes de Gandhi for its dazzling descriptions. Read it as if you were an explorer or an anthropologist. But give it a pass if you’re looking for escape or think “Heck, I’d love to go to India one day.” Because based on this account, I’m not so sure Patrick Roy would go back.

- Arielle Aaronson

La raison vient à Carolus, by David Turgeon

AS HIS BASEMENT floods and his plumber tarries, our unnamed narrator rescues boxes containing the “archives” of his childhood friend Carolus. It’s a compelling frame – who hasn’t sifted through forgotten mementos, piecing together the past from a handful of fragments?

The novella is mostly a description of Carolus’s unpublished, unfinished works. One posits a theory – “every book was part of a larger whole, which we don’t know how to decipher” – that aptly describes both the task at hand and a life of reading more generally. Turgeon’s influences are on display, from Pessoa who provides the epigraph to Borges who looms large, but a suburban setting and contemporary references make this story feel very much of its time and place. Carolus strikes the right balance and pulls the right number of strings for a book of its length. The narrator’s inquest unearths truths of dubious veracity about the mysterious Carolus and his own childhood and youth, and friendship and love, with death always hovering just in the background. In this fallen world, he wonders, hadn’t they at least managed to put something on paper that might transcend time? But what?

- Pablo Strauss

Les familles combattent le fascisme!, by Jacob Wren
trans. Christophe Bernard

WHAT HAPPENS to an average nuclear family when a conspiracy theorist moves into the basement? In Les familles combattent le fascisme! paranoia spreads like a mould. None of the family members, who take turns narrating, are quite the same after, though it seems to take very little to turn their lives upside down.

Jacob Wren’s novella is in many ways the odd-man-out in the Nova series. It’s the only translation (from English, with no apparent hitches). It is more political than personal. And it feels more like a play than a novella – one that must be very funny in the right actors’ hands. The humour comes through on the page, somewhat understated, and those amenable to conspiracy theories may find themselves slapping the table in agreement as they read. The story moves rapidly along and ends with a twist. You won’t look at the unmarked white van across from your house the same way again.

- Pablo Strauss

Red Mountain

ambos — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 17:10:30 +0000

La montagne rouge blew me away the first time I saw it. And the second time. The writing is so raw and visceral, I almost prefer to read the words aloud to myself on the page than see the play in performance. ≈

IN TRANSLATION

From La montagne rouge (SANG)

by Steve Gagnon
≈ translated by Peter McCambridge

YOUNG WOMAN, in darkness

These days, there’s winter
and there’s you.
And it’s almost the same thing.
Winter is cold,
and you’re no longer with me.
It’s almost the same thing.

Light on the young woman

YOUNG WOMAN

Here you go.
I acted out a letter to you.
My love.
This morning I screamed a brutal letter for you.
I revealed to the whole world, in the middle of the bus
standing in the middle of the bus
how I’ve been torn apart
how guilty I feel.
My guilt and my love and my rage, too, my tears.
And my madness.
But mainly my guilt.
And my tears.
It was a ridiculous gun
a rifle
maybe a hunting rifle
it might have had lead bullets, I don’t know
it was long like a hunting rifle
it was absolutely ridiculous
I was absolutely ridiculous
but I stuck it right in their faces.
Right in their surprised little faces.
And then I said “I’m firing.”
I said “Bye. I’m firing.”
Cries.
Panic.
“Kiss each other again and I’m firing.”
I said
“I’m firing my ridiculous hunting rifle.
It might be a lead bullet, but I’m firing.
I might not know how to put the bullets in the rifle, but I’m firing. If I don’t work out how to put the bullets in the rifle, I’ll hold it in one hand and throw the bullets at you with the other. It will be weird, it will be ridiculous, but I’ll shoot the pair of you some time or another. Some time or another I’ll fire at you like two scumbags, like two empty Coke cans, like two crows, like two witches.”

The Mountain

YOUNG WOMAN

Sometimes I bump into people I haven’t seen in a while who ask me – of course they ask me – how I am, what’s new, who ask me how
you
are.
I tell them things are great, couldn’t be better, that we might be heading off on a trip somewhere
that it would be fun anyways
that you’re back at school and really enjoying it
that your parents moved so we got an apartment together
you and me
that it’s hard to believe but you cook more often than I do, that you watch all kinds of cooking shows and you’re really good, that we’ve ended up with all kinds of spices, our place is overrun with them
that we’re looking for a new fridge because the old one packed it in
I ask if they don’t happen to know anyone who would sell us theirs
cheap.
I tell them you’re working so hard
that you’re a pilot
that doesn’t surprise them,
you’ve never been afraid of heights
that you fly the big white planes
that time flies
that sometimes we just manage to see each other
at night.
That makes them laugh.

Pause

I haven’t started telling people you’re dead.

Pause

I’ve come back here
to our mountain
the red mountain
the mountain of love
the mountain of blood.
I’ve come back here a year after you, without really knowing why.
To try something.
To hear you.
To talk to myself like some stupid bitch, by the sound of things.
A fucking headless chicken.
To shout.
That’s it.
That would do me good.
And hold nothing back
let it all out
it might tear me up again, but as long as something happens, right?
Shout at the top of my lungs long enough for
some of the words I’ve spit out to fall on the right spot
and go down into the earth
to fall
and join you
find you.
For a while back there I was naïve and I might have said:
… find you
and… bring you back.
I had long enough to work out that was never going to happen, mainly because of the laws of physics, but also because death is disgusting
I hate death
I fucking hate it.
And nobody says a word in front of it.
We don’t cry or shout because not knowing where it ends drives us mad
where it ends
where the “Thank Christ it’s over, that’s it!” comes in.
It doesn’t seem real.
We put on a show for everyone around us. Not wanting to traumatize anyone.
We decide to live with it. We pretend to be normal, we pretend that everything’s OK.
That’s it.
God, I think it would really do me some good to get together with everyone else on earth who’s worked out that in death there isn’t just death, but that it’s terrible.
It would’ve been easier to see you die with those women who cover their heads with veils
and get down on their knees and wail
the ones that fall
and wail
the ones with the wrinkled faces to explain their pain.
The ones that strip off and draw
the ones that sing for nights on end to drive out whatever’s hurting them and who won’t stop so long as there’s still something pissing them off.
The ones who get together
and share their feelings.
The ones who display their dead on mountains and never forget them.

I’d eat a whole forest to try and get back
that feeling of calm I had when
every night with you
it felt like all of nature was pouring into me.
I want you to fuck me.

Where are you when I touch myself at night and think of you. Hey? Where the fuck are you?

I haven’t come back to ask for help or pray
or hope that nature comes to my rescue.
With you not here–
it’s like nature for me, these days, is just a photo of seaweed stuck to the side of an aquarium, you know?
I’ve come back here to stand still for a while.
Properly. For two minutes.
Stand still like winter does when it’s cold.
Stand still like deserts do when they’re dry.
Let myself be consumed like something burning up.
The flames of a sun that sears the roadkill off our highways.
Calm down a little.
It’s fall.
It’s windy
it’s going to rain
it’s cold.
It’s windy
it’s going to rain
it reminds me of you.
You couldn’t just settle down somewhere, could you?
You always had this wind here in your belly and in the hands worrying at your skin
that made you change sides.
You turned right around.
The slightest move made you uncomfortable.
Super fragile.
You always ended up closing the windows
bringing the chairs in off the deck.
I’ve come here today to celebrate you and to hate your fucking guts.
I’ve come here to talk to myself about you
to remember you
to see you again.
You, my castle of Atlantis.
It’ll hurt, I suppose, but I hope it will be great.
A relief anyways.
To touch you
to feel you close to me.
I need a big, long walk without going anywhere
I need – do you get it? – once and for all
to exorcize the demon with you and tell you
my love
tell you–
But
for the moment
to hear you
talk with you
understand.
And for you to talk to me, my love. I’m not kidding here.
I feel like a bit of a freak but I need you to talk to me.
I need to feel you
here
with me
and for you to talk to me.

≈ ≈ ≈

YOUNG MAN appears

The Red Mountain.
Our hundred square feet of unknown turf.
You called it our heaven.

YOUNG WOMAN

What? The Red Mountain?

YOUNG MAN

OK. The Red Mountain.
You don’t know the song?
Here in this small room
Sleep has stolen you but
Strange noises keep me awake
I can see your body is a boat
Keeping you afloat in dreams.

YOUNG WOMAN

(Diary, page 2, September 28, 2008)

Given that at the minute I have to concentrate on being able to breathe, I told Mom I was dropping out of school.
Until January, if all goes well.
I need to breathe a little.
I need to come back to life because I’m just floating between dreams and nightmares during the day and hell and dread at night.
Blow me out it hurts
I need your air.

YOUNG MAN

I told you about red mountains that rise out of water
I told you about a house under three full moons
And I wonder what you’re dreaming on your silent journey
And caressing your forehead I tell you more stories.

Are you happy to be on my side in this world of billions?
Should we continue this ride that hasn’t even begun?
My body is a boat and your body is a boat
Keeping us afloat in dreams.

YOUNG WOMAN

(Diary, page 3, January 17, 2009)

The holidays were awful, a real shit Christmas, but it’s funny: today I felt better.
It’s funny.
I went back to school this morning, and I was counting on it to take my mind off things, get me thinking about something else.
But it’s funny because when I got on the bus I saw us.
Sitting at the back.
It’s mad.
Two lovers who looked so like us, my love.
Magnificent.
The guy was handsome like you
like a god.
The girl was radiant like me
like an angel.
It’s mad.
They make me feel better.
It’s funny, eh?
They kiss like kings hiding gold in their mouths.
Magnificently.
All day long I thought of them
and it made me feel better.
I went to my classes like everyone else
I bought my books like everyone else
I ate.
I did it all in tears but at least I did it.
I’m happy.
I think things are looking up.

YOUNG MAN and YOUNG WOMAN

My body is a boat and you are travelling in me. ≈

A Constellation of Stories

ambos — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 18:00:06 +0000

Stories about falling in love, about writers not writing, about everyone around us thinking we have great lives and the small things that eat away at us inside all the same. Stories about being surrounded by friends and family and still feeling empty and alone. Stories about learning how to live. About the things that really matter, the things that connect us to loved ones and that we’re too embarrassed to ever mention again. About loss. About mothers who seem distant as movie stars in their daughters’ eyes. Some have more plot than others. Some are so centered around an idea they’re more like an explanation or apology. All are monologues, unmistakably spoken, resolutely down to earth. And every single one of these 37 stories is beautiful. Simple and beautiful.

IN TRANSLATION

From Chaque automne j’ai envie de mourir

by Véronique Côté and Steve Gagnon
≈ translated by Peter McCambridge

CONSTELLATION

What’s really terrible is to think that things are going to stay this way forever.

Before, I never wanted to own a thing. I didn’t want to buy a single piece of furniture. I wanted to be able to leave on a whim, without having to explain myself, pack things away, organize everything. I didn’t want anything holding me back. It was all a bit extreme. Now I have furniture. Not much, but some all the same. I haven’t taken off all that often, either. I wanted to be able to leave – it’s not the same thing. Now I know that being able to drop everything and go is all in the mind; it’s rarely about furniture.

I’ve travelled a little. Like everyone, like lots of people my age, actually. I like it. Being uprooted from my life. Torn out. I love travelling alone and arriving someplace where nobody knows the first thing about me, someplace where I could be absolutely anyone, where I could be everything I am not here. I get weak at the knees whenever I arrive someplace and I think to myself: “Here, I could.” I could slip away to live here, leave everything, leave Quebec. What’s keeping me here, after all? People? Hmm. But what if I was tired of it all one day, if I was completely fed up, if things kept going round and round in circles for too long, if I was stuck in a corner, if there wasn’t anyone after all. Then I could go there. A little town in the south of Portugal. Sweep in like a witch, move in somewhere on the second floor, someplace where the windows would always be open. With an all-white bed in the middle of the room, my linen sheets, a wooden table, two chairs, and nothing else. Dresses, books, and pretty drapes. Get up early in the morning and go down to the port to buy fish. Get to know the fishermen a little. Ask how their wives are doing. Work mornings in a café run by my new French friends. Do my grammar exercises in my little Portuguese book, serve iced watermelon juice and Ginja, do the dishes outside, cook shellfish. Write in the afternoon, or give tourists a massage. It would be easy. Have a child with blue eyes, who speaks two or three languages and knows how to swim. Learn the names of the birds and plants over there. Celebrate Christmas.

Nobody would know a thing.

I have nothing to hide. It’s just that one day, without you knowing why, the people around you know who you are, or think they do. They’ve made up their minds, they think they’ve got you all figured out, they tell themselves that you’re complicated or naïve, that you’re always reading, that you’re not funny or have no patience, that you’re too kind and gullible, that you sleep around, that you don’t know what you want, that you want it all, that you don’t want enough, that you’re an opportunist or you’re not ambitious enough, that you’re moody or a scatterbrain, or a control freak, that you’re a hypochondriac, that you’re a feminist, that you’re motherly, that you’re jealous, that you’re poetic, and it’s true, or not, and it doesn’t really matter: the fact is you become what others think you are, and that’s what paints you into a corner, much more than any furniture.

That’s why I like travelling alone. Why I get a little weak at the knees at the thought of starting out all over again somewhere else and having a completely different life.

What’s really lovely, too, is when these dreams of another life come together, shining out in the dark like tiny beacons, like a constellation of all possible worlds. If where you are isn’t working any more, if this life doesn’t appeal to you any more, you can always come here; it’s bright here all the time. Whenever I close my eyes, I can see the light of those little glowing windows all over the world.

Tavira. That’s what the little village in Portugal is called, Tavira.

When I was small, I used to dream of moving house, changing schools, and being the new girl in class.

Now, sometimes I dream of the same thing. I dream of a place where no one knows me, where I would be brand new.

But.

Deep down, I dream even more of wanting to stay somewhere.

TONGUES

Childhood is a war that’s been lost. Lost, lost, lost. Lost over and over, lost forever.

In general, people, adults, pretend they don’t remember how brutal it all was. Makes them feel too uncomfortable. They’d rather not remember how bloody the battles really were. How low the lows could be. How cruel the other kids were.

Everything we build ourselves to get through later life is like a post-war lull. But if we fess up and say it, kids can be really nasty. No worse than us, but just as bad. If we remember how things really were, what really went on, it’s enough to take our breath away. It breaks us up into a thousand tiny little pieces, smashes our knees in. Until we can hardly stand.

Kids are brutal. Later on we teach them to pretend they aren’t so wild.

“Smile,” we tell them. “Say ‘Thank you,’” we tell them. “Stop pulling that little girl’s hair,” we tell them. “Don’t stick your tongue out,” we tell them. “My little angel,” we tell them. “Don’t stick your tongue out, my little angel. Smile.” Childhood is a war that’s been lost, for all eternity. That’s one of the few things I know.

I just had one mom and half a dad. My dad worked at Baie-James. My mom didn’t want to live up there. She was cold all the time, so we lived in Limoilou. It was freezing there, too, but I dunno, I think Mom would’ve died up there. Up in the tundra. When Dad came home on vacation, it was one big party. He had three weeks off for the whole year: two in summer, one at Christmas. The rest of the time, Mom and I got by OK. I would pretend not to hear her cry at night. And she would pretend not to cry. On Fridays she would put mascara on both of us. I wasn’t wild about it, but I’d let her do it because it cheered her up. She would do our makeup and buy a mille-feuille for us to share, like two dolls playing at having a tea party. Now I think back on it and it breaks my heart: my mom, just her and her daughter, every Friday night, all through her twenties, Mom as pretty as a princess with her mascara, as rare as a rare flower, pale as an orchid, Mom who would knit and work hard at the hospital like a good girl, Mom who taught me to behave myself, called me “my little angel.” Mom who would lower her eyes whenever she met a man. She was pretty as a starlet and she lived like a nun. My dad, too, he was good-looking. Good-looking like Marlon Brando. He just wasn’t there.

Anyway, I don’t know why I’m talking about all this. Because I felt lonely, I suppose. That’s a lie: I know exactly why. I felt so alone. And I was. Still am.

I had loads of friends, though. All boys, all neighbours. I was a real tomboy when I was a kid. Apart from the mascara on Friday nights with Mom, I didn’t do any girly stuff. I thought girls were annoying, I thought they were big babies, I thought they were soft. And scaredy cats.

I thought they were cry-babies. I preferred playing outside with my friends. We were always together. We did everything together, all the time. We rode around on our bikes every night from May to October, we went to the store to buy chips and pop. We hung out in the schoolyard, we played hockey, we swam at Alex or Marceau’s house, we stole carrots from Madame Bélanger’s garden behind our house. I was an only child. I had a mom in tears and a dad three weeks of the year, but they, they were my brothers. Alex, Oli, Champoux, Marceau, Ben Sirois. My brothers.

We had a hiding place beside the river. We were really close, it was really cool. But one time something happened. Something happened that made me lose all that. It was the end of school, I remember it really well. Three days to the end of Grade Five. One night in a little wood not far from where we lived, they stopped playing and tied me to a tree. I was bigger and stronger, but there were five of them, so they tied me up to a tree, really tight.

Then they all kissed me, hard, badly, roughly, one after the other. With their tongues. I fought like crazy. For nothing. It didn’t change a thing. It was wild. They were kids. Brutal. That night I hated my dad for being up north, I hated my mom for teaching me how to put on mascara instead of showing me how to fight, I hated being a girl. That night I hated everyone I loved most in the world. I cried. Like a girl.

After that came the longest summer of my life. I was big, then really all alone because I couldn’t ride bikes with my gang any more. There was no gang any more, I wasn’t their friend any more.

Childhood is the war you lose the day you lose your brothers. ≈