Catherine Leroux’s latest collection of stories inhabits a profoundly enigmatic space. Each tale revolves around the imagined life of a real woman – the so-called “Madame Victoria,” whose remains were found outside the Royal Victoria Hospital in 2001 and whose identity, despite thorough investigation, is still a mystery. Here, Leroux has taken this unsettling news bite as the starting point for twelve portraits of possible lives.
Since its publication in 2014, Eric Dupont’s La Fiancée américaine has sold more than sixty thousand copies in Quebec. Using sales figures as any kind of metric for artistic worth is a slippery slope, of course. But the number above is worth pondering for several reasons. Check the shelves in just about every household in Quebec with any inclination toward literary fiction and you will find a copy of Dupont’s novel. It’s the Thriller or ABBA’s Greatest Hits of its world, with a popular reach most serious writers stopped dreaming of decades ago.
In Licia Canton’s second collection of short fiction, generations of Italian-Canadians negotiate old-fashioned gender roles in a new country, sliding fluidly between different languages and cultures. Canton writes with profound empathy, conveying deep emotions and complex family dynamics through the memories, ambition, tenderness, and regrets hidden under the quiet surfaces of
her characters.
Land for Fatimah is a powerful tale about land ownership, dispossession, power, and poverty told through the eyes of four women. Veena Gokhale approaches these beefy topics with such detail, sophistication, and delicacy that it is clear the story is deeply rooted in her own time working in a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Tanzania.
By now we know money can’t buy happiness. But why can’t it even bring reprieve from financial worry? Can anyone find freedom and meaning in our capitalist paradise, or is the human obsession with money pathological and insurmountable? These questions run through all twelve of the stories collected in Net Worth.
In some ways, Martine Delvaux’s White Out is an origin story and a family history. However, as the title indicates, it is a narrative dominated by blankness, where absence matters as much as presence. The absence of the narrator’s father functions as a central void, which threatens to consume anything that is solid and tangible about her life. The text is, by necessity, a story without a climax or resolution; it is driven less by plot than by a series of meditations and unanswered questions. Nonetheless, the compulsive energy of the language, translated into English by Katia Grubisic, is such that it hits the reader like an avalanche or a blinding blizzard. There is little to grasp on to, but the reading experience is consuming.
Juliana Léveillé-Trudel’s recently translated novel Nirliit opens with a trip North to Salluit, a “postcard paradise” that is just past Puvirnituq, the “Most Violent Community in Nunavik.” Nirliit means snow geese in Inuktitut, and the narrator identifies with these birds, for she too travels north in the summer and south in the winter. In the opening, the narrator returns to learn that her friend Eva has disappeared. From its first pages, Nirliit resuscitates, albeit somewhat knowingly, the tropes of colonial literature: The disappearing Indian. The fucked up, drunken Indian. The stoic one. The gone.
If you seek something harrowing and suffused with poetic elegance, this may be the book for you. With a sensual realism that at times bleeds into fantasy, Awumey lays before us the life of West African playwright Ito Baraka.
Early in Leila Marshy’s novel The Philistine, the protagonist, Nadia, abruptly declines to board a return flight from Egypt to Canada and arranges instead for an open-ended ticket allowing her to stay indefinitely. What looks at first glance like a refusal to go home becomes far more ambiguous because of how the novel unsettles the categories of home and away, travelling and arriving, belonging and exile.
In Blue Lake, history and tragedy threaten to repeat themselves in each generation, with each character “doubled and shadowed by past, present and future.” In this community, it’s considered perfectly reasonable to camouflage your cabin with paintings of trees or to cultivate a garden of poisonous plants, fertilized with the ashes of family and friends.
What do we do in a crime novel where there is no hard-boiled detective working the case? No tenacious cop playing cat-and-mouse with the killer, no small-town spinster shrewdly putting together clues? What do we do when we walk into the story after the thrill of the chase?
When Tessa, a jaded Montreal real estate agent, meets her new client Évelyne, she is quick to diagnose the situation. “I do this week in, week out,” she says. “Guessing each client’s household drama has become second nature to me.” Divorce, of course, tops the list, and Évelyne, to whom Tessa mentally assigns a blubbering, “suffocating” husband, is no exception. So begins Hunting Houses, the English translation of Quebec playwright and translator Fanny Britt’s first novel, Les maisons.
