Fifteen Favourite Quebec Novels pour la Fête

For the day, a list of fifteen novels by Quebecers – born and bred – all deserving more attention. In each case, the image presented is the cover of the edition I read. Descriptions are short, but clicking on the links will give a better idea as to why they were selected.

Was 1960 the banner year for Quebec literature? 1962? 1916?

Les Anciens Canadiens
Phillipe-Joseph Aubert de Gaspé
1863

The second French-language novel – following son Philippe-Ignace-Francois's L'influence d'un livre (1837) – Les Anciens Canadiens is set in the decades surrounding the fall of New France. Steeped in history, culture, and the supernatural, I've read it twice, but only in translation.    

Armand Durand

Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
1868

A novel I read in French translation, though it was composted in English. Makes sense in a way because Mme Leprohon was even more popular amongst French readers. Like Les Anciens Canadiens, it leans heavily on what would've then been described as Canadien traditions and culture. A moving tale of love and betrayal.

La Scouine

Albert Laberge

1909

Condemned by Mgr Paul Bruchési, Archbishop of Montreal, as "ignoble pornographie," you can understand the attraction. La Scouine is populated by dislikable, immoral, and hypocritical characters, clergy included. It is, in short, the anti-roman a terre. Sadly, Laberge paid a real price in writing this novel.

The Miracle Man
Frank L. Packard
1911

A gang of thieves and con artists leave New York City for rural Maine so as to get in on the scam pushed by a blind faith-healer, only to find there there is no grift. The 1919 Hollywood adaptation is considered one of the great lost silent films. Since writing my 2011 review twenty-four more seconds have been found. I couldn't be happier.

Similia Similibus
Ulrich Barthe
1916

A Great War nightmare in which Germans invade Quebec City, seize the Legislative Assembly, and slaughter citizens, this novel was almost certainly inspired by propaganda involving supposed atrocities committed in Belgium. Civil servant Barthe's lone novel, it is itself propaganda.

Marion: An Artist's Model
Winnifred Eaton
1916

No other Montreal family has been so remarkable. Though a novel, Marion provides the most intimate glimpse of the Eatons' struggles against racism and poverty. Winnifed was a successful novelist with a career in early Hollywood. Whether she was the most accomplished of the twelve Eaton children is a matter of debate. Imagine!

Les Demi-civilisés

Jean-Charles Harvey

1934

Another banned book, the villain this time is Jean-Marie-Rodrigue Villeneuve, Archbishop of Quebec, who condemned it for criticizing religion. It does not. What Les Demi-civilisés does criticize is the Roman Catholic Church. The novel has been translated twice, but John Glassco's is the one to read.

Erres boréales
Faurent Laurin [Armond Grenier]

1944

The craziest Quebec novel I've read thus far, in Erres boréales massive heaters have been placed in the Gulf of St Laurence so as to make Quebec a tropical paradise. A travelogue of sorts, the story follows friends as they explore the province, now an independent country with palm trees.

Les Plouffe

Roger Lemelin

1948 

Roger Lemelin's first book, for decades Les Plouffe stood second only to Gabrielle Roy's Bonheur d'occasion as the best known French Canadian novel. The television series it inspired made for essential viewing. So why is Mary Finch's translation not in print? I blame Bertelsmann.

Le Libraire
Gérard Bessette

1960

The story of a washed up man who somehow manages to get a job in a shop selling stationary, religious items, and books. After a time, the proprietor comes to trust him with selling literature banned by the Catholic Church. Le Libraire was first published in France, not Quebec... 'cause, you know, the Church. 

 

The English Governess
Miles Underwood [John Glassco]

1960

First published in Paris by Olympia Press, The English Governess is both this country's finest and best selling work of erotica. That said, I much prefer Harriet Marwood, Governess, the more elegant version of the love story, published fourteen years later. 

Doux-amer
Claire Martin [Claire Montreuil]

1960

A literary editor is presented with a bad manuscript by a good looking woman. He reworks, remakes, and remodels, crafting a work that is both a critical and commercial success. A novel of obsession, it is vaguely Nabokovian – which is always a plus.

Four Days

John Buell

1962

This writer is far better known for his first novel, The Pyx (1960), but it was the second that caused critic Edmond Wilson to place Buell alongside Marie-Claire Blais as one of Canada's great writers. Of the nineteen novels I've helped return to print, this is my favourite.

The Damned and the Destroyed

Kenneth Orvis
   [Kenneth Lemieux]

1962

Another novel I helped usher back to print, The Damned and the Destroyed is set during the earliest days of Jean Drapeau's first term. Its hero, a Korean War vet, is hired to go after the heroin ring polluting the veins of a rich man's daughter. Lee Child is a massive fan.

Une Chaîne dans le parc

André Langevin

1974

Jack McClelland considered this novel the best to have come out of French Canada since Bonheur d'occasion. Sadly, sales did not in any way match expectations. Alan Brown's 1976 translation received no second printing and has been out of print ever since. The novel is a masterpiece.

Bonne fête!

Related posts:

Gothique Canadien

Armand Durand; or, A Summer Project

Ignoble Phorographie - Translated!

The Miracle Man on Paper and Nitrate Film

Dreaming of the Hun

Glassco's $9500 Library and the Montreal Eatons
Cardinal Villeneuve's Folly
Global Warming as a Nationalist Dream

What's Going on with The Plouffe Family?
Reading Gérard Bessette on His Hundredth
Canada's Olympians (Part III)

Claire Martin at the Start of a Quiet Revolution
Four Days in Darkest Quebec
'A Relentless Story of the Hell of Drug Addiction'
Langevin's Masterpiece; McClelland's Disappointment

The Very Best Reads of a Plague Year

Not one week into 2020, I met a physician friend for dinner at Sidedoor in Ottawa's ByWard Market. Over too many drinks, he told me of his concerns about a virus sweeping through China's Hubei province. I'd seen a bit about it on the CBC and had noticed headlines in the Globe & Mail, but didn't take the threat nearly so seriously. Again, too many drinks. Eleven months later, we've just spent our first Christmas apart from our daughter. Parents and a grandparent, who live well within driving distance, were kept at bay. To think that in last year's 'Best Reads' I described 2019 as "a very strange year."

Here's to better times.

I reviewed twenty-one titles here and in the pages of Canadian Notes & Queries this year. Tradition dictates that I suggest three most deserving of a return to print. Easily done:

The New Front Line
Hubert Evans
Toronto: Macmillan, 1927

The first novel by a writer remembered – when he is remembered – for Mist on the River (1954). Here Evans draws upon his own experiences as a returning Great War veteran who rejects the city and its commerce for a healthier life in rural British Columbia. The love of a good woman figures.

Perilous Passage
Arthur Mayse
New York: Pocket, 1950

West Coast rural noir written by a transplanted Manitoban, this tale of two teens confronting a drug cartel brought back such memories. Nothing to do with battling crooks, you understand, rather being young. I was caught up in Joe and Devvy's adventure and romance. I'm betting you will be, too.

Blantyre—Alien
Alan Sullivan
London J.M. Dent, 1914

The first book I read this year, and the first of the author's thirty-something novels, Blantyre—Alien has grown on me. A story as strange as its title, it concerns a medical doctor, his wife, and their disintegrating marriage. I found interest in its depiction of Toronto the Good  

Two books I reviewed this year are currently in print:

The lone book revisited this year, I first read Not for Every Eye, Glen Shortliffe's translation of Gerard Bessette's Le libraire (1960), as a very young  man in in the summer of '85. I found I liked it more in middle age because my more seasoned self better understood narrator and protagonist Hervé Jodoin. An essential text for anyone interested in censorship as depicted in fiction or the dark days of Duplessis' Quebec. Not For Every Eye is available through Exile Editions. 

Does Armand Durand count? I read Mrs Leprohon's 1868 novel in a 19th-century French translation by J.-A. Genaud. The original is in print as part of the Borealis Press Early Canadian Women's Series. My French is so very weak that it took months for me to get through the novel. I wonder whether spending all that time with the Durand family contributed in some way to my concern for their trials.  

Two of the three novels selected last year as "most deserving of a return to print" did just that! I'm proud to say that I played a hand in both:

I Am Not Guilty
Frances Shelley Wees
Montreal, Véhicule, 2020

Following The Keys of My Prison, this is the second Wees novel I've helped revive. I'm torn as to which I prefer. In this 1954 tale of domestic suspense, a widow relocates to post-war suburban Toronto in an attempt to solve her husband's murder. Martinis and harried businessmen figure. Patti Abbott was good enough to provide the introduction.

The Ravine
Phyllis Brett Young
Montreal, Véhicule, 2020

First published in 1962 under the nom de plume Kendal Young, The Ravine was Phyllis Brett Young's only thriller. Remarkably, it remains the only one of her novels to have been adapted to the screen. Don't bother with the film, read the book. The introduction is by Amy Lavender Harris.

Praise this year goes to Mary Chapman and the ever-expanding Winnifred Eaton Archive. This online site provides a remarkable wealth of material concerning the groundbreaking Asian-Canadian author of Marion and "Cattle", amongst other novels. Of late, I've become increasingly interested in Eaton's Hollywood years. The Archive somehow satisfies while fuelling my desire for more. Do visit!

And now, the resolutions:

I've got three book projects on the go, but will be doubling down on telling the awful story of Maria Monk. As a result, fewer titles will be reviewed here next year. I'll be filling the gaps by reviving 'The Dustiest Bookcase.' Seasoned readers may remember it as a series of short pieces on books I've always meant to review (but haven't).

Oh... and as always, I resolve to keep kicking against the pricks.

Wishing everyone a Happier and Healthier New Year! Bonne année! 

Related posts:

The Very Best Reads of a Very Strange Year (2019)

Best Books of 2018 (none of which are from 2018)

The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2017
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2016
The Year's Best Books in Review - A.D. 2015
The Christmas Offering of Books - 1914 and 2014
A Last Minute Gift Slogan, "Give Books" (2013)
Grumbles About Gumble & Praise for Stark House (2012)
The Highest Compliments of the Season (2011)
A 75-Year-Old Virgin and Others I Acquired (2010)
Books are Best (2009)

What to Do? What to Do?

Just Kids

Stranger in a Strange Land

Reading Gérard Bessette on His Hundredth
Armand Durand; or, A Summer Project

Domestic Suspense in Small Town Ontario
Nature as the Devil's Playground

Reading Gérard Bessette on His Hundredth

Not for Every Eye [Le libraire]
Gérard Bessette [trans. Glen Shortliffe] 
Toronto: Macmillan, 1962
98 pages

Yesterday marked the centenary of Gérard Bessette's birth. I spent an hour or so reading this translation of his most celebrated work. A novella – not a novel, as Macmillan claims – it isn't very long.

Bessette's title, Le libraire (The Bookseller), refers to narrator and protagonist Hervé Jodoin. It takes the form of a journal written on Sundays, when the bars are closed. The first entry involves Jodoin's arrival in the fictional Quebec town of Saint Joachim, where he has accepted a job in a bookstore. In truth, it's as much a bookstore as, say, Indigo; the better part of the establishment has been given over to toys, stationary, and religious articles. The book department is in the rear, allowing Jodoin to pass a good portion of the day in a quiet snooze.

Killing time is Jodoin's main occupation. He quickly settles into a routine – "book shop, beer parlour, room; room, book shop, beer parlour." At the end of each workday, he heads for Chez Treffelé, a working class bar where he drinks alone at a table located conveniently near the lavatory. After that – meaning, after the bar closes – Jodoin makes for his rooming house bed.

A crack appears in what Jodoin describes as "the monotony of my life" when the store's proprietor, Léon Chicoine, determines that his new bookseller is a believer in liberty and is a proponent of free thought. Chicoine unlocks a door to what Jodoin had thought was a closet, revealing the "sanctum sanctorum," a small, windowless room lined with books found in the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, and listed by Abbé Bethléem and Père Georges Sagehomme.*

Chicoine demands Jodoin's discretion, and asks him to sell the volumes (at inflated prices) to "serious purchasers." Our hero agrees, and starts off for Chez Treffelé "caressing the innocent notion that perhaps after all I was not yet completely useless, that perhaps my life might have a meaning."

Sadly, Jodoin's new customers fail to give meaning to his life:

They sidle up to me with a conspiratorial air and murmur into my ear the name of some author or book, all this in the same tone of someone asking for a condom or a suppository in a drug store. Others are more evasive still; they shower me with meaningful glances and ask me to recommend "something a little out of the ordinary" or "something with a kick to it."

Jodoin quickly comes to resent the extra work involved in retrieving volumes from the sanctum sanctorum, recognizing most aren't at all interested in liberty and freedom of thought: "If these jokers are looking for an aphrodisiac, they can find more effective ones."

The crack widens and drama begins with a pimply-faced boy he recognizes as a student of the Saint Roch School, "located a couple of miles from the town in open country, in the middle of a vast domain belonging to  a community of clerics who combine the dairy industry with the rearing of young men." The student asks for a volume by Voltaire, and whether "through curiosity or a kind of fellow-feeling produced by nostalgia for my own school days," Jodoin retrieves a copy from the sanctum sanctorum.

Le libraire was first published in Paris because Bessette was unable to find a Quebec publisher. This was in 1960, mere months before the Quiet Revolution began. Within two years, the novel had found a Quebec publisher, and had been translated and published in English.

I received this copy of Not for Every Eye as a gift on my twenty-third birthday. I read it the very same summer. A university student at the time, I used its story, and the story of its publication, in writing papers on the Quiet Revolution.

Much of the revolution took place when I was asleep in a crib.

I have people like Gérard Bessette to thank that it did.

* Researching this piece, I was amused to discover that Georges Sagehomme's Répertoire alphabétique de plus de 7000 auteurs avec leurs ouvrages au nombre de 32000 (romans et pièces de théâtre) qualifiés quant à leur valeur morale (1931), was revised nine times; the last – published twenty-nine years after his death – is Répertoire alphabétique de 16700 auteurs 70000 romans et pièces de théâtre cotés au point de vue moral.

Trivia: There is an actual St-Joachim, Quebec, located roughly thirty kilometres downriver from Quebec City, but it bears no resemblance to the town depicted in Bessette's novel.

More trivia: Adapted by M. Charles Cohen for CBC Television (1963) and CBC Radio (1967). The former starred Jack Creley, Larry Mann, and Barbara Hamilton.

Object: A slim volume consisting of white boards with purple type, as an objet Not for Every Eye is my favourite Macmillan of Canada book. Credit goes to Leslie Smart. Arnaud Maggs designed the jacket.

Bibliophiles will appreciate the adverts for other Macmillan titles on the back cover. I own three, but have read only one.

Access: The translation may be neglected, but it is not rare. Very Good copies are offered online for as little as ten dollars. I've seen some evidence of a softcover edition that may have been a rebind. It would seem that in 1977 the novella was absorbed into Macmillan's moribund Laurentian Library, though I've yet to encounter a copy. I have, however, seen the 1984 edition, issued by Exile (right). It is still available for purchase.

A second English translation, which I've not read, was published in 1999 by Guernica Editions. Its translator, Steven Urquhart has written a very interesting essay about the need and process:

Retranslating a Quebec Classic

The Urquhart translation is also still in print.

Remarkably, there is a Czech translation, Skandal V Knihkpectvi (Scandal in the Bookstore; Prague: Odeon, 1974). Collectors may be interested in a copy inscribed to Bessette by translator Ea Masnerova on offer from an Oregon bookseller.

Copies of Le libraire are plentiful. The cheapest copy I've seen offered online is going for one Yankee dollar. Few copies of the first edition, published in Paris by Jilliard, are in evidence.

The LSD CanLit

Regrets? I've had a few. Just last week I passed on a fine Macmillan first edition of Bernard Epps' Pilgarlic the Death that was priced at two dollars. Why? Well, I already had the 1980 Quadrant Edition... and I wasn't thinking straight. Don't get me wrong, I pretty happy to have this:

But I could've also had this:

I don't know that Victor Moscoso or Stanley Mouse had anything to do with that early cover, but they certainly deserve some credit. From the Summer of Love through the first dozen seasons that followed, Macmillan and rival McClelland & Stewart look to have been caught up in a psychedelic grove that embraced the most unlikely of authors.
I'm thinking here of old folks like Stephen Leacock, social conservative and staunch Conservative, who died thirteen years before the word "psychedelic" was even coined. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the David John Shaw cover above looks like it might've graced Joe Rosenblatt's The LSD Leacock (Toronto: Coach House, 1966).

Even writings about Leacock bring the Merry Pranksters to mind.

I don't mean to suggest that our two big publishers were unique, rather that they were more hip than their American and British counterparts. Just cast your glazed gaze upon the McClelland and Stewart edition of Farley Mowat's 1969 The Boat Who Wouldn't Float

...and compare it to the first American edition from Little, Brown

...and the staid first British edition, published by Heinemann in swinging London.

Next to Pilgarlic the Death, my favourite cover of those heady times was drawn by an anonymous hand for Gérard Bessette's Incubation (Macmillan, 1967).

But I don't think there's a greater example of this short-lived trend than McClelland & Stewart's 1969 cover for Never Sleep Three in a Bed, Max Braithwaite's boyhood memoir. Here we see the author's father, George Braithwaite, driving the family car into Pepperland.

That sun on the cover is setting. The new day and new decade would be less colourful. Macmillan was still capable creativity, while M&S decended into what I refer to as "The Letraset Years"

1973

1974

1979

... about which, the less said the better.