Vince Tinguely

With Mayonnaise, the second book of the 1984 trilogy, the poet and novelist Richard Brautigan becomes Rivages's central fixation. Among Plamondon's forest of factoids about Camus, General Jodl, and Saint Antoine, about the Remington Rifle Company and the Singer Sewing Machine, Charlie Chaplin and Vladimir Nabokov, Brautigan emerges as a commanding influence.

Péan tells these stories without a sense of outrage or anger, because he’s writing as a Quebecer, with a sense of sometimes uneasy but always real belonging, and it is this sense that permeates Taximan from beginning to end.

Fragment follows fragment like thoughts in a mind suspended between waking and sleeping, and again and again the book returns to the life of actor and Olympian Johnny Weissmuller. And yet this novel, the first part of a trilogy, isn’t a difficult read. The prose is translucent, flowing, beautifully translated from its original French by Dimitri Nasrallah.

The Keys of My Prison is the latest Canadian noir thriller to be resurrected by the Ricochet Books imprint of Montreal’s Véhicule Press. Established in 2010 and curated by Brian Busby, the Ricochet series has brought such long-lost titles as Sugar-Puss on Dorchester Street and Blondes Are My Trouble back into the public consciousness.