Remembering Gaétan Soucy: Four Novels by the Weirdly Lyrical Quebec Writer

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.