Gaétan Soucy, « La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes »

 -ebook

 

Lu du 20 au 27 janvier 2022

Mon vote : 

 

 

Dans La petite fille qui aimait trop les allumettes, le roman au titre andersenien de Gaétan Soucy, tout comme dans le conte auquel il fait allusion, c’est la figure du père, absent mais pas moins effrayant, qui décide le cours de l’action. Ajoutez à cela la phrase de Ludwig Wittgenstein cité dans le moto du livre, « Tout le problème vient de ce que les douleurs sont toujours représentées comme quelque chose que l’on peut percevoir, au sens où on perçoit une boîte d’allumettes », et vous aurez une première clé de lecture d’un roman fascinant non seulement par ses accents mythiques et fabuleuses mais aussi par son allégorisme, son introspection et son langage hermétique.

Alice Munro, "The Progress of Love"

 – ebook

Read from January 5^th to 16^th 2019

My rating: 

Given that I have already reviewed three of Alice Munro’s books (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, (the best of all to date, in my humble opinion)  Runaway and The View from Castle Rock) and given that the eleven short-stories in The Progression of Love develop similar themes and motives (in the same unique style, of course) such as love, loneliness,  bigotry, family, etc., by using her well-known narrative tools (broken timeline, subtle irony,  free indirect style etc.), I decided to let the narrators speak this  time. However, because the book left me wondering whether love is a work in progress, or a progression towards something else, I’ll just try to point which way it goes in three kinds of love observed (fillial, fraternal and spousal), illustrating it with a quote. 

Filial love could “evolve” into either self-deception or resentment. The narrator of the first story (that also gives the book title) tells to whoever wants to listen how her mother had burned in front of her husband the three thousand dollars (a small fortune in those times) she inherited from her much hated father even though they were very poor, underlining once and again, in a voice full of admiration, how, as a supreme proof of love, her husband did not think for a second to stop her. But the story is not true and she knows it:

Why, then, can I see the scene so clearly, just as I described it to Bob Marks (and to others—he was not the first)? I see my father standing by the table in the middle of the room—the table with the drawer in it for knives and forks, and the scrubbed oilcloth on top—and there is the box of money on the table. My mother is carefully dropping the bills into the fire. She holds the stove lid by the blackened lifter in one hand. And my father, standing by, seems not just to be permitting her to do this but to be protecting her.

On the other hand, the narrator in Mile City, Montana, remembers how irrationally resentful and judgmental she felt towards her parents when she was a child and a boy in their town accidentally died:

I charged them with effrontery, hypocrisy. On Steve Gauley’s behalf, and on behalf of all children, who knew that by rights they should have sprung up free, to live a new, superior kind of life, not to be caught in the snares of vanquished grownups, with their sex and funerals.

The love for siblings implies often the same self deception or resentment. The now adult Colin in Monsieur Deux Chapeaux knows that the love for his younger brother has become also his burden, from the age of thirteen when Ross had tricked him into believing he had shot him dead:

He knew that to watch out for something like that happening—to Ross, and to himself—was going to be his job in life from then on...

Violet, who has taken care of her sisters from a very tender age and whom her fiancé broke up with when he found about her siblings some despicable behaviour, tricks herself into believing it was her who sacrificed her love for the sake of the family:

That was the way Violet saw to leave her pain behind. A weight gone off her. If she would bow down and leave her old self behind as well, and all her ideas of what her life should be, the weight, the pain, the humiliation would all go magically. And she could still be chosen. She could be like the June grass that the morning light passed through, and lit up like pink feathers or streaks of sunrise cloud. If she prayed enough and tried enough, that would be possible. (A queer streak)

Most of the stories illustrate spousal love, and the various ways it transforms itself when confronted with betrayal. For the “pensioned-off” wife in Lichen, who has mockingly got the power to transform the new women in her husband’s life in mere parasite plants, born from his infatuation and vanishing as soon as he tires of them, the sentiment has become caricatural witchcraft:

She said, “Lichen.” And now, look, her words have come true. The outline of the breast has disappeared. You would never know that the legs were legs. The black has turned to gray, to the soft, dry color of a plant mysteriously nourished on the rocks.

In Circle of Prayer, Trudy, remembering both her happy and sad times with her husband who meanwhile had left her for another woman, discovers that love (and the end of it) is nothing more than a “breathing space”:

She sees her young self looking in the window at the old woman playing the piano. The dim room, with its oversize beams and fireplace and the lonely leather chairs. The clattering, faltering, persistent piano music. Trudy remembers that so clearly and it seems she stood outside her own body, which ached then from the punishing pleasures of love. She stood outside her own happiness in a tide of sadness. And the opposite thing happened the morning Dan left. Then she stood outside her own unhappiness in a tide of what seemed unreasonably like love. But it was the same thing, really, when you got outside. What are those times that stand out, clear patches in your life—what do they have to do with it? They aren’t exactly promises. Breathing spaces.

On the contrary, for Isabel, who has left her perfect family behind, the breathing space is outside the suffocating, dutiful love she too often had convinced herself she had to feel:

She knew about Laurence’s delicacy and kindness, as well as she knew his bullying and bluffing. She knew the turns of his mind, his changes of heart, the little shifts and noises of his body. They were intimate. They had found out so much about each other that everything had got cancelled out by something else. That was why the sex between them could seem so shamefaced, merely and drearily lustful, like sex between siblings. Love could survive that—had survived it. Look how she loved him at this moment. Isabel felt herself newly, and boundlessly, resourceful. (White Dump)

The same dutiful love leads a husband towards deliberate blindness in front of the strange behaviour of his wife (who apparently had enjoyed the sight of a murder scene so much she jealously kept the gory details for herself), by convincing himself that the victims were, at the end of the day, of no importance:

He thought of himself telling Peg about this—how close he had to get before he saw that what amazed him and bewildered him so was nothing but old wrecks, and how he then felt disappointed, but also like laughing. They needed some new thing to talk about. Now he felt more like going home. (Fits)

The book ends with a verse in Old Norse I don’t know how to pronounce and couldn’t verify is real but I liked the sound of in my own invented pronunciation:

Seinat er at segia; svá er nu rádit.  (It is too late to talk of this now: it has been decided.) (White Dump)

Jean-Marc Léger, Jacques Nantel et Pierre Duhamel – "Le code Québec. Les sept différences qui font de nous un peuple unique au monde"

 – Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2016 ; 240 p. ISBN 978-2-7619-4641-4

Lu du 8 au 28 février 2017

Mon vote:

De ce livre, mes amis Francine et Claude m’avaient parlé avec enthousiasme un soir, devant une tasse de thé au Centre-Ville de Montréal, pendant qu’on attendait voir un film… roumain, auquel c’étaient eux qui m’avaient invitée, car il y a toujours un désir d’échange culturel entre nous – eux, ils veulent apprendre plus sur mon pays d’origine, moi sur le leur, qui peu à peu est devenu aussi le mien. Le lendemain, quand on s’est rencontrés de nouveau, cette fois chez eux,  ils me l’ont prêté volontiers et, malgré le grand nombre de statistiques, la lecture n’a pas du tout été ennuyeuse, au contraire, grâce à l’approche facile que les auteurs ont su donner à leur sujet.

D’ailleurs, le premier d’entre eux, Jean-Marc Léger, est le créateur de la plus grande firme de sondage canadienne, tandis que Jacques Nantel est professeur émérite dans le domaine de marketing à HEC (École des hautes études commerciales de Montréal) et quant à Pierre Duhamel, il est un journaliste spécialisé en économie et en affaires. Avec un tel trio, les résultats ne pouvaient être que les meilleurs.

Margaret Atwood, "Survival – A Thematical Guide To Canadian Literature"

- Anansi Toronto 1972 ISBN 088784-613-0

Read from September 16^th to October 2^nd 2015

My rating:

I think this is the first time ever I’ve read a book of literary criticism without being familiar with the name of at least some of the writers it was talking about (in fact I know of two of them, Alice Munro and Leonard Cohen, but theses ones are too little discussed to really count).

It was a strange feeling, as when familiar ground becomes suddenly unfamiliar, however, it did not stir any inferiority complex, since I’m fully aware my “Calit” knowledge is very limited. In fact, this is one of the reasons I decided to read it – to guide me through a culture I’ve been curious about since I came here, ten years ago. Another reason is of course, the author – not only I am a big fan of Margaret Atwood but I’ve also been always interested in the iconic writers’ attitude towards the literature of their native country.

Alice Munro, "The View from Castle Rock"

 –Penguin Modern Classics, Canada 2010 ISBN 978-0-14-317740-1

Read from April 10^th to May 5^th 2015

My rating: 

Marin Preda, a great Romanian author, declared once in an interview, speaking of his most famous character: “Ilie Moromete, who really existed, was my father.” I’ve always used this quote as an example for my students of how writers like to maintain a deliberate confusion between fiction and reality.

In her Foreword of The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro is even more ambiguous. After informing the reader that there is an historical truth behind her stories, she emphasizes the word stories as though putting it in opposition with the concept of real events, only to suggest immediately afterwards that reality and fiction are impossible to be told apart, that you can read them, without being wrong, either as the biography of a family or as a narrative inspired by this biography:

These are stories.You could say that such stories pay more attention to the truth of life than fiction usually does. But not enough to swear on. And the part of this book that might be called family history has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative. With these developments the two streams came close enough together that they seemed to me meant to flow in one channel, as they do in this book.

Margaret Atwood, "The Penelopiad"

 – Alfred A. Knopf, Canada 2005 ; ISBN 0-676-97418-X

Read from April 17^th to 9^th 2015

My rating:

I’m not the first to say that, even though I could hardly remember the episode of the twelve maids’ hanging in Penelope’s myth, after reading Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad I will never forget it again.

As you probably know, this novella was written as part of an ambitious and interesting project called “Canongate Myth Series” and started by the Scottish publishing house Canongate Books, which challenged over a hundred authors to rewrite universal myths. It is said that the first choice of the author was a Norse legend, followed by a Native American one, but in the end she remembered the twelve maids from Odyssey and decided to make them speak for themselves, together with Penelope, as she states in the Introduction:

I’ve chosen to give the telling of the story to Penelope and to the twelve hanged maids. The maids form a chanting and singing Chorus which focuses on two questions that must pose themselves after any close reading of The Odyssey: what led to the hanging of the maids, and what was Penelope really up to? The story as told in The Odyssey doesn’t hold water: there are too many inconsistencies. I’ve always been haunted by the hanged maids; and, in The Penelopiad, so is Penelope herself.

Yves Beauchemin, "Les émois d’un marchand de café"

 – Québec Amérique 1999, ISBN 978-2-8903-7993-0

Lu du 6 au 19 février 2015

Mon vote : 

Ma première rencontre avec un auteur québécois de langue française s’est révélée tout à fait charmante. Dans un style simple et robuste et préférant un néo-réalisme qui se moque éperdument de toutes les trouvailles postmodernistes de la fin du vingtième siècle, Yves Beauchemin développe dans Les émois d’un marchand de café un thème aux inépuisables ressources tragi-comiques : le bien qui peut faire du mal.

Alice Munro, "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage"

 – e-book

Read from to October 28^th to November 11^th 2014

“Forsooken” but not forsaken

In a time of either careless abandon or generous inclusion of any literary technique ever thought of, Alice Munro still manages to surprise the reader, not only with her deceptive narrative perspective or her sly manipulation of the timeline, but also with the unexpected development of well-known themes, the powerful recreation of places and people and the plethora of significations.

I read so many volumes of short stories, including one of hers, but I can hardly recall holding a better one in my hand. The first and the last stories of this amazing book are masterpieces. The other eight are not far behind. On the whole, a perfect ten that undoubtedly puts Alice Munro among the geniuses of the genre.

All tales are about relationships, which end or not in marriage, the main theme of the book, suggested firstly by the title in which the word stands alone like a purpose or an end, then it is developed and mirrored, sometimes indirectly, in each of the ten stories with its own theme.

Hugh MacLennan, "Two Solitudes"

- Afterword by Robert Kroetsch – McClelland & Stewart Ltd. 2008

Read from October 2^nd to 15^th 2014

My Rating

My ineffable Quebec, my love

Quebec is a magic place. You see it and you are besotted. You live in it and you become addicted. Almost imperceptibly you think of it not only as your home but also as your wonderland.

I often wander Montreal’s streets, never tiring to marvel at the people and places’ diversity. Nowhere else in the world the word “cosmopolite” makes more sense than here, furthermore, I almost believe this was the place that originated it, with its incessant scrolling of people from any corner of the world you could think of, with its happy charivari of languages more or less recognizable, with its interesting display of customs and traditions, with its generous, never-ending offer of artistic events. Whatever your mother-tongue, sooner or later you would hear it, in the street, or in a supermarket, or in a theatre foyer. Whatever new the place you happen to come by, sooner or later you meet a friendly face.

Margaret Atwood, "Alias Grace"

Emblem Editions, 1999

Read from June 18th to July 8th, 2012

My rating

Take a sensational event. Gather all information available about it, credible or not (testimonies, newspaper articles, letters etc.). Fill in the gaps with your own imagination. Carefully delete any border between reality and fiction. Here it is: the perfect recipe for a postmodernist novel. 

And what a novel! As usual, Margaret Atwood creates a "oeuvre d'art". The story of Grace Marks, a "celebrated Canadian murderer" of the 19th century, is retold in a ludic manner, enriched with unexpected meanings and robbed of all her "real" reality to be invested with a whole "fictive" reality. Do you get now the "alias" in the title? Of course, the surprising adjective stands also for the subtle transformation of "grace" into a commun noun, and for many other meanings, yours to discover.