Reviews

Klara du Plessis reviews Marc Di Saverio's new translation of some of Émile Nelligan's poems and Louise Dupré's Rooms

Rose & Poe, a novel by Montreal Gazette sports columnist Jack Todd, is a North American fable loosely based on The Tempest. It tells the story of Poe, a simple-minded, hunchbacked gentle giant with six fingers and six toes, and his doting mother Rose. The pair have a modest existence cleaning houses, making cheese, tending goats, and merrymaking in their local tavern in Belle Coeur County, a fictional region of New England surrounded by water on three sides and Quebec the other.

This is the fourth Pick-A-Plot book from Conundrum Press written and illustrated by Tjia, and it’s the first in the series to feature a protagonist that isn’t a feline. Instead, as the title makes obvious, you are the mother of Alice Liddell, the reputed inspiration behind Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

When I listen to local classic rock station CHOM, large chunks of the commercial breaks are devoted to the corporate owners’ satellite network and to hawking ad time on the station – not a good sign. Into this twilight era, like an only-slightly-premature obituary, comes local author Ian Howarth’s Rock ‘n’ Radio, a passionate paean to the golden age of the airwaves here in Montreal.

own here, we’re all going to hell and we know it, no need to warn us.” This crucial bit of information comes on ...

It’s easy to see why Dominique Scali’s first novel, In Search of New Babylon, was a finalist for the 2015 Governor General’s Literary Award, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, the Prix des libraires du Québec, and winner of the 2015 First Novel Award at the Festival du Premier Roman de Chambéry in France. The story is tightly woven and executed with masterful shifts in chronology and narrative focus. The characters are quirky and compelling. The language of W. Donald Wilson’s translation sings with rich detail. Short, staccato-like chapters propel the story forward with the pacing of good television. This is in no way meant as an insult – seamless storytelling is difficult to achieve, and Scali accomplishes that with virtuosity in this novel.

The new issue of the international magazine Granta dedicated entirely to Canadian writers, a first for the publication, feels a bit like a simple, local literary reading – a number of different voices with different perspectives all sharing the same stage and conversing with one another. Featuring stories, essays, and poems, some of which were translated into English from French, the Canada issue of Granta is also, with a few exceptions, not at all what you would expect it to be.

Six Degrees of Freedom, Nicolas Dickner’s story of the mysterious journey of a rogue “phantom container,” follows characters who have a healthy sense of wonder but are determined to make something of that wonder too, impatient as they are with the pedestrian uses humankind makes of its own inventions. The novel, translated into English by Lazer Lederhendler, doesn’t indulge much in romantic reflection; its characters move too quickly for that. They’re dreamers, but they also do.