Recently I found an old New Canadian Library copy of Mordecai Richler’s second novel, Son of a Smaller Hero, originally published in 1955 (this copy a reprint from 1969), in a Little Free Library. When I find one of these tightly bound pocketbooks with their abstract, blotchy-arted covers second-hand, they’re nearly always pristine, but their pages a particular yellow that makes me think of Lipton soup mix from my childhood.
This one, about the St. Lawrence Boulevard neighbourhood of Montreal, got me thinking about my Québécois reading project. Francophone writers are not well known and their works are not often read outside of Québec (even if they have been translated into English). If this didn’t trouble me on principle, books like Pascale Quiviger’s If You Hear Me (2015; Trans. Lazer Lederhendler, 2020) and Eric DuPont’s Life in the Court of Matane (2015; Trans. Peter McCambridge, reissue 2021) serve as reminders that readers who prioritize CanLit while overlook the Francophone writers are really missing out.
Another I’ve dipped into this year is the collection of letters between Gabrielle Roy and her sister (translated by Patricia Claxton): Letters to Bernadette. I’ve had it on the dictionary dresser and pick it up to read a random letter, when I am seated nearby for a period of time and have no current read nearby. This is not an effective way to explore Roy, but because I’ve already read and enjoyed all her novels (even the children’s books-charming!) and most of her non-fiction, I am happy simply to settle back into her voice.
I say not effective, but I mean inefficient, because many times I open to the 1965 letter which contains this worry: “I’ve sent Clémence vitamins but she never says anything about them, so does she even take them?” Gabrielle is always sending vitamins! (It’s not true; only, I keep reading the same letter.) And I am repeatedly taken to New Smyrna Beach in 1969 to a letter which begins “I’m devastated to hear that you no longer have your diction class…really, really devastated.” Even though the two sisters actually did not spend much time together during their lifetimes, they were obviously very close: this letter is addressed Ma chère petite soeur and signed Much love. So I am regularly devastated by proxy. Perhaps bending the spine into new creases would help.
My French language skills remain stubbornly at a level which usually dictates my reading choices are books I wouldn’t choose to read in English. John Green’s YA fiction is a challenge in French and the Dear Canada books, which are actually for much younger kids, strain my brain because they all have specific vocabulary suited to their historical settings (like girls living in a tuberculosis sanitarium or with fathers building the railroad through the mountains in the 19th century).
Languages of Our Land: Indigenous Poems and Stories from Québec (2014), edited by Susan Ouriou, includes some translations from the French by Christelle Morelli with source languages ranging from Wendat, Innu-aimun, Cree and Algonquin. The parallel translations are very helpful. One of the authors included here is Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau (I admired her Winter Child a great deal, which Ouriou and Morelli also translated) and I also read a slim volume of correspondence exchanged between her and François Lévesque.
Their letters in La bienveillance des ours are often about these authors own specific works but also about the craft of writing and how they have broached or avoided certain personal topics and life experiences in their creative work (but, also, when they have included autobiographical elements in their fiction).
Over time, their relationship grows. “Cette correspondance que nous amorçons, pour moi, c’est de l’oxygène littéraire, François writes to Virginia. “Je n’ai jamais partagé avec un autre écrivain les aléas, les difficultés ou les fulgarances de l’acte d’écrire. Geste si intime et si largement public en même temps,” Virginia writes to François.
Kaie Kellough’s Accordéon (2016) landed in my stack because I loved Dominoes at the Crossroards, which was on the Giller list last year. Accordéon is presented as a series of anonymous testimonials about sightings of a flying canoe in Montreal.
Not that the canoe is proven to exist; it’s an element of folklore, so no official statement has been issued and anyone reading these testimonials shouldn’t read anything into the decision to collect and record these anecdotes. Is it entertainment? Is it a comment on decolonization? Who knows. Maybe it’s an actual canoe, because there’s also a debate about what language(s) its voyageurs can speak while travelling. Ask Dany Laferriére—he was there. And check the footnotes, which actually run alongside the concise reports.
I was particularly pleased to find Dany Laferriére in Berri metro in Kaie Kellough’s novel, because I’d just finished reading Adam Leith Gollner’s Working in the Bathtub: Conversations with the Immortal Dany Laffiére (2020).
Laferriére clearly travels with a notebook on the metro and everywhere else, because he’s a prolific writer. (I’ve read four of his books but only discussed 1985’s How to Make Love to a Negro and 2009’s The Return here, both translated by David Homel.)
This was the case with The Return, which he describes as “first and foremost, a poetic book Whether the sections are in verse or in prose, it is poetic throughout.” He “wrote it all in verse” to begin with: “I wrote it in Port-au-Prince: standing up, walking down the street, in the car, sitting at friends’ places. But in transcribing the notebooks, I realized that the text I’d written needed some context and some explanation, and so the prose sections are more to provide context. The prose is the jewel-box, and the verse is the jewel.”
He’s a Haitian writer, living in exile: “I had always taken one basic precaution in Haiti, which was not to get myself killed by being an idiot.” And his birthplace fundamentally influences his being and his writing: “To be from Haiti, to be imbued with coffee, the scent of mangoes, the taste of avocados, the smell of leaves, of jasmine, or ylang-ylang: those things came from my birth. They weren’t things I had decided.”
But he also reaches beyond that, allowing his ideas to percolate and interweave, which is the aspect of his work that I most enjoy and admire: “All my ideas stay with me for a long time before seeing the light of day. What’s important is that an idea needs to find its place in the structure that I’ve been building for almost 40 years. I need to be able to link each book project to at least two other books.”
It’s Laferriére’s writing-eye, his ongoing work to connect, that draws me into his narratives. Even in The Return, there is so much about storytelling and, here, in a work dedicated to writing, I was flagging passages every couple of pages. Passages like this:
“I’m not scared when I can’t write. I just don’t write. I don’t have that issue. I can extricate myself from the writing. But I really like it when I’m in that second state, where you are no longer just yourself, where you are inhabited.”
What have you been reading in translation lately? If you consider yourself a CanLit reader, when did you last read a Québécois writer?
Well I am always hugely impressed by anyone even attempting any kind of reading in another language. My foreign language skills are non existent.
Pshaw. “Sashay away” is French, isn’t it? 😀
I have been meaning to read something by Dany Laferriere for a while now. Maybe someday I’ll get there.
My last book from Quebec was Boring Wife Settles the Score. I do have a couple on the shelf from QC I want to get to!
I will never try to read my books in French… It would be too frustrating and take too much time. But I do get to practice with all the notices and emails from the school!
His memoir about being in Haiti during the 2010 earthquake is very short and powerful and I read it in a single sitting: The World is Moving around Me.
I’d like to read that pair but just haven’t gotten there yet. I can’t remember-did you say?-if you enjoyed this one as much as the first?
I still spot nouns that I picked up via various school projects (via step-parenting) that I probably wouldn’t otherwise know: who knew it would be useful! Hehehe
Just added his memoir to my “favourites” – thank you!
I enjoyed the first one more. I think it’s better, but it might also have something to do with being pleasantly surprised about what I was going into. For the second book I was expecting that again and it didn’t quit live up to the first one. But both are fun. And, if there’s going to be another, then I’m glad to have read them both so I’ll be ready!
If you’re like me, once an author’s work reaches a certain size, I appreciate a trail through the woods into the clearing of their expanding shelf, a quick read to determine how (or whether) I’d like to journey further.
She left room for another one? Sheesh, I had no idea. But I think she’s written serials for kids, so I guess that makes sense. But with grown-up heroines.
I haven’t read a word of French since fifth form. I did a year of Arabic at uni and I may have read the twenty or thirty words I was required to learn – it’s a lovely language to write though.
Emma you met through me! I reposted your Eleanor Dark reviews together and saw you begin to comment on each other’s posts.
My last novel in translation was An I-Novel, written in Japanese (and English) and set in and around NY, so that’s nearly Canada from here.
That would have been amazing. If it was a language option for me at uni, I overlooked the possibility. (There was a single-credit, beginning language requirement there, but I chose Latin. Ahem.) I should look into it now as a future project!
Oh, yes! That was it. Thank you for connecting the dotted line for me and reminding us how it actually played out. Look at you, single-handedly matching readers around the globe. 🙂
LOL You’re lucky I love NYC. Some people might take offense to such lumped-in-together-ness-es. Hee hee. (Your post on that one led to a swell of “saved” lines on my library account.) FWIW, NYC is only a 12-hour drive away. It’s not all that far. Did you know that Peter Ustinov famously described Toronto as being like NYC but run by the Swiss in the later ’80s? Have a feeling only Torontonians cared about that. (I wasn’t one, then, but am now.)
8:17, Rue Darling, by Bernard Émond is probably the last French Quebecois writer I’ve read (& that was in English). Pretty good, though! I’m not really capable of reading anything in French beyond the back of a cereal box. But I might do better with historical fiction or fantasy. Due to all my Latin, I tend to be better with things that have existed for a long time & then fall down on words like ice cream or television. (Alright, well I know both of those…)
Saul Bellow is a Chicago writer… 😉 They can’t have him!
LOL When the step-kids were in French immersion (one of my main incentives for keeping at the language), we had running family jokes about how the words we would least expect actually turned out to be le ice-cream or–oh, see, it’s perfect–télévision. But I can see where Latin would come in handy and lead to different translation strengths. (I only had one year, but I loved it-the orderliness of it, the specificity. I always meant to finish the second course independently, but it never happened.) That sounds like a good read to me. And I kinda agree about Bellow, but at a gut-level not an informed-level, though if you feel strongly about it, feel free to get all proprietary. Hee hee
As a French major in college, I read Kamouraska by Anne Hébert and various other Francophone novels in French. My foreign language reading skills have plummeted since then! Recently I just about coped with a French picture book that ended up in the Little Free Library. (Although he wasn’t writing in French, I suppose Saul Bellow might be considered Quebecois. I’ve read a couple of his.)
I didn’t know that! Did you study any Marie-Claire Blais? She’s often in there with Hébert. Hahaha, well, as discussed with Liz, sometimes those kids’ books are tricky. Maybe you should give yourself a teensy bit of credit for those low-level hurdles. By virtue of being born in Québec, I suppose Bellow would fit, but he did leave Canada when he was quite young, I think? Generally speaking, I think Anglophone writers in Québec have to be strident Quebeckers (like Mordecai Richler, historically, and Heather O’Neill in contemporary lit) with an overt sense of being rooted in their environs to be thought of as Quebecois writers…it’s one of those complicated political situations, partly as clear as funding and borders, partly as muddy as belonging and in/exclusion.
Ha, you’ve made me change my tune: I was actually a dual English and Religion major, with a French minor. I petitioned to be the first ever at my college to do a triple major, but was denied. I was only a few classes short of the major requirement for French, anyway. I don’t know of Blais.
That matches my memory (except it actually wasn’t quite my memory as I couldn’t come up with the combo myself). It remains of interest to me that you read in French (as I always assume that American students are more likely to study/pursue/prolong Spanish as a second-language course of study). But, then, I guess geographically there’d have been populations both to the south and north of you that were Francophone?
I can read books in French, depending on the book. I mostly take advice from Emma at Book Around the Corner who visited Melbourne in 2019 so she knows how bad my French is!
But I’ve only ever read Quebecois books in translation. The publisher QC Fiction has just sent me a copy of The Woman in Valencia by Annie Perreault, and I’ve previously read In Every Wave, by Charles Quimper, translated by Guil Lefebvre also published by QC Fiction, plus The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman, by Denis Thériault, translated by Liedewy Hawke. But my most recent read was Ru, by Quebecois-Vietnamese author Kim Thúy, translated by Sheila Fischman. Of these the Quimper was more to my literary taste than the more sentimental titles.
Hahaha It’s only recently (i.e. this year) that I’ve been bookchatting with Emma (perhaps we connected via your blog?) and she has recommended an author to me, whose stuff looks perfect for my level. I just have one more book to finish which I had in progress and then I’m going to give him a try. Coincidentally, the French novel I just finished was also a Kim Thuy, Em. Her sentence structure is terrific for second-language readers–but I also know that there are intricate aspects to her storytelling that I’ve likely missed in the French so I’m on hold for the upcoming English translation too. I loved the Quimper, so beautifully handled. The Perrault is intriguing. I’ve had the Thériault on my TBR for years (thanks to Naomi, I believe); is it the more sentimental one you’re referring to?
I know what you mean about reading in French – I can manage a children’s book now but I really struggled with The Hobbit because of the specific weapons vocabulary! Hopefully I’ll reach a level where I can read a book in Spanish soon, although I can work my way painfully through running magazine articles now.
For sure, I’ve tried to read a fantasy novel (in French) exactly once and gave up. Though I’m guessing it’s l’orc et l’ent which wouldn’t be bad. LOL The first kids book I tried immediately caused problems cuz I didn’t recognize the word for “Gables”. Not that Anne talks much about her house past that title, but I was demoralized from the start (and the long turn-of-the-previous-century prose was another sticking point). So you subscribe to a running magazine in Spanish? That’s an interesting idea!