The news this evening is the Gaétan Soucy, one of Quebec's most interesting and original writers,
died Tuesday of a heart attack at the age of 54. The winner of several big prizes in the Francophone world, he published four strangely haunting novels.
The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (translated masterfully by Sheila Fischman) was the first French language novel in recent years to reap accolades and good sales in translation.
The best known,
At the time I reviewed the book for Quill and Quire, and what I said there still holds true:
"Margaret Atwood could have been thinking of Soucy's novel when she called the chapter about Quebec literature "Burning Mansions" in
Survival, her groundbreaking work of CanLitCrit.
"Cleansing fires which destroy old ancestral houses, she pointed out, occur frequently in Quebec novels and seem to reflect a collective desire to cast off the past in order to build something new. Nearly 30 years later, this symbolism still touches the Québécois soul, it seems, to judge by the enormous success of Soucy's little gothic tale...
"It opens with the narrator, a very strange adolescent, describing what happens the morning that the patriarch of the family is found dead by his children. They must deal with the world for the first time, and as they do, they are forced to try to make sense of what has happened in the family over the previous 15 years. Terrible secrets and horrendous misunderstandings come out. Before the final conflagration more people die and small animals are killed in grisly ways.
"All this would be depressing and unrelievedly weird were it not recounted by this bright child/adult who loves words but whose use of them is delightfully unusual. For example, someone who writes things down is a "secretarious," an epileptic convulsion is a "stoppit" and a coffin is a "grave box." Birds, flowers, the forest, grass and music are all described lyrically too. In the end the originality and clarity of the descriptions transform the story from being merely grim into something having the weight and appeal of those bloody fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm."
Q&Q had me review his other three novels too. Also interesting is his
Vaudeville!:
"The time is a 1929 that never happened. The place is a New York where the Order of Demolishers is tearing down buildings, and the Demolished are looking for shelter wherever they can find it. At a Demolition site Xavier, a young apprentice Demolisher, finds a little casket a with talking, singing female frog inside. He takes her back to his tenement room, and it looks for a while as if she will be his ticket out of his troubled life if he can work her into a vaudeville act.
"But all is not as it seems in Gaétan Soucy’s third novel which is sometimes very funny and sometimes creepily prescient. The frog is not a cartoon character transplanted to a novel nor is Xavier the immigrant from Hungary he thinks he is. It turns out he is not even Xavier, but a creature just as unnatural as the devastated landscape left behind by the Demolishers.
"Soucy has spent much time in Japan, and began the book in Nagasaki, site of the second A-Bomb detonation in 1945. The destroying civilization he describes in Vaudeville is completely concordant with the one which developed nuclear weapons, while the New York he paints looks like the pictures taken near Ground Zero after September 11, 2001. Subplots like the one telling the interwoven stories of a pretty hairdresser and a bed-wetting super-macho Demolisher only make the novel more complex and compelling. The ending, as Soucy’s fans have come to expect, is surprising, disturbing and weird.
... "
Not to mention,
The Atonement:
" Gaétan Soucy’s novel Atonement is as carefully put together and as disturbing as a painting by Belgian artist René Magritte. Although the surrealist painter meticulously represents a familiar world, Magritte’s universe, like Soucy’s, seems ordered by unnatural laws of physics. Soucy describes concrete, physical things such as food and snowballs, but these objects constantly change their form and context, creating the impression that they are all part of a dream.
"Initially, the entire storyline appears straightforward, told in clear, well-constructed sentences. On a brilliant December day shortly after the end of the Second World War, 44-year-old Louis Bapaume travels toward a village in Quebec where he lived as a young man in order to atone for a past misdeed. En route, he falls asleep and dreams that he is five years old and seeing his father for the last time. But when he’s jolted awake, he discovers that the car he’s travelling in has become stuck in the snow. Bapaume must be in Montreal in time to play the organ at the Notre Dame Basilica for Christmas Eve, so he enlists the help of Canadian soldiers who are deployed at a railroad station.
"That’s a simple enough beginning, but early in the story Soucy sows the first hint that all is not what it seems. “Louis’s dream had plunged him into such a state that he was still waiting for proof that he was well and truly awake. What was happening now didn’t convince him. Perhaps he’d emerged from one dream only to enter another.”
"When the incongruities and strange coincidences multiply, the reader begins questioning the difference between reality and memory..."
And finally,
The Immaculate Conception:
"Anyone interested in French Canadian literature will want to read Gaétan Soucy’s
The Immaculate Conception. Not only does it deal with many of the themes which preoccupied Quebec writers during the second half of the 20th century—Montreal slums, sexual repression and fires which sweep away the past—it is a road map indicating where the prize-winning Soucy was headed from the beginning.
"The novel, published in French in 1994, was Soucy’s first, but it is the last of his four works to be translated into English. The complicated story begins with a letter written by an undertaker to a friend in New York, detailing a massive fire that swept through a bar in Montreal’s river front industrial area and killed at least 30 people. The next morning a bank clerk takes his paraplegic father to see the ruins and is observed by three boys and a teacher, Clémentine Clément. She is sure that the boys are up to no good, and warns her school’s principal, a handsome priest whom she has loved for years. The book ends a week or so later on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. She is pregnant, possibly by the brother of the undertaker or perhaps by one of the boys or maybe (who knows in a book like this) by the Holy Spirit.
"Soucy used many elements of this story in his later novels—fires, snowstorms, males who maybe female, wraith-like little girls, young men mistaken about their origins. Two bit players in
The Immaculate Conception—Rogatien W. and Justine Vilbroquais—are even at the center of Vaudeville!, Soucy’s most recent fiction.
"
The Immaculate Conception lacks the splendid word play, lyrical observations and convincing weirdness of Soucy’s best-selling later books, though. It is as if he were learning his trade here: in fact he gives some of the best descriptions—the fire victims die with “cackles of agony” and red hot building stones are “glaciers of blood”—to an undertaker’s helper named Soucy. No doubt someone will use this fact in an academic literary analysis of Soucy’s work. In the meantime the book gives Soucy fans much to puzzle over, which is part of the pleasure of reading him. "
It is a sad that we will have no more of his weirdly lyrical fictions in the future.
It's always difficult to make up reading lists for book discussion groups. You want to have a certain balance, include a few books that will challenge the reader plus others that are simply a pleasure to read. And then, if you're working with libraries, you usually have to make sure there are enough copies for everyone to be able to read it.
It took me a couple of days after the announcement of Detroit's very close brush with complete bankruptcy to remember Harriette Arnow's novel about life in Motor City during the Second World War, The Dollmaker. 
I first read the book after Joyce Carol Oates wrote about it in The New York Times in 1971. It had more or less been forgotten, even though it had been a big best seller when it was first published. Whe I read it, I found it engrossing. The image of the steel mill Arnow paints has stayed with me ever since. 
There's been a lot about the impending birth of the new third in line to the British throne: the Duchess of Cambridge, the former Kate Middleton was due to give birth July 13, but didn't. Probably a good thing because the British press reports that Prince William was out playing polo on Saturday.
I haven't been able to find out if the book has been translated into Japanese, but I doubt it has. Imagine what hackles would rise among the British Royal Family's friends if a Japanese writer wrote a novel about Princess Diana and her unhappy life.
The news this evening is the Gaétan Soucy, one of Quebec's most interesting and original writers, died Tuesday of a heart attack at the age of 54. The winner of several big prizes in the Francophone world, he published four strangely haunting novels. The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches (translated masterfully by Sheila Fischman) was the first French language novel in recent years to reap accolades and good sales in translation.
This just in: two more of my books are now available on Kindle.
Jhumpa Lahiri's short story collection Unaccustomed Earth kept me up reading late recently, and this despite the fact that I'd read four of the eight stories previously in The New Yorker.
The book continues to explore a circle of character types she has
written about before: upper middle-class, educated Indians and their
children living in the United States. Full of carefully-observed
detail, the stories present the dramas that resonate with those of many
of the people who read The New Yorker.
Children succeed or fail disastrously, parents die, love comes or does
not: there must be tens of thousands of intelligent readers who can
sympathize with Lahiri's people.
A major--and
telling difference--is the way the Badami wants to understand how her
characters fit into a world much larger than the one of intimate
relationships which Lahiri almost always favours. Night Bird
is the best example of this, because its three women characters are
caught up in Hindu-Sikh conflicts that permeate a good part of Indian
politics, and spill over tragically into North America. At the
heart--and the end--of the novel is the Air India disaster, which until
9/11 had the unhappy distinction of being the world's most fatal
civilian terrorist attack.
In 1949 when Maclean was in his early mid 40s, a crew of 15 elite Smokejumpers were trapped in an immense conflagration in Montana just hours after their jump. Only three survived, and for years afterwards Maclean was haunted by both the fire and what the young men must have gone through. His account, Young Men and Fire: A True Story of the Mann Gulch Fire, was published two years after his death in 1990. Long awaited, it won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1992.
"Beyond the world of sight and soon even beyond fear, the nonhuman elements of heat and toxic gasses were becoming the only two elements, and soon heat was even burning out fear..."
