Recently I found an old New Canadian Library copy of Mordecai Richler’s second novel, Son of a Smaller Hero, originally published in 1955 (this copy a reprint from 1969), in a Little Free Library. When I find one of these tightly bound pocketbooks with their abstract, blotchy-arted covers second-hand, they’re nearly always pristine, but their pages a particular yellow that makes me think of Lipton soup mix from my childhood.

This one, about the St. Lawrence Boulevard neighbourhood of Montreal, got me thinking about my Québécois reading project. Francophone writers are not well known and their works are not often read outside of Québec (even if they have been translated into English). If this didn’t trouble me on principle, books like Pascale Quiviger’s If You Hear Me (2015; Trans. Lazer Lederhendler, 2020) and Eric DuPont’s Life in the Court of Matane (2015; Trans. Peter McCambridge, reissue 2021) serve as reminders that readers who prioritize CanLit while overlook the Francophone writers are really missing out.

Another I’ve dipped into this year is the collection of letters between Gabrielle Roy and her sister (translated by Patricia Claxton): Letters to Bernadette. I’ve had it on the dictionary dresser and pick it up to read a random letter, when I am seated nearby for a period of time and have no current read nearby. This is not an effective way to explore Roy, but because I’ve already read and enjoyed all her novels (even the children’s books-charming!) and most of her non-fiction, I am happy simply to settle back into her voice.

I say not effective, but I mean inefficient, because many times I open to the 1965 letter which contains this worry: “I’ve sent Clémence vitamins but she never says anything about them, so does she even take them?” Gabrielle is always sending vitamins! (It’s not true; only, I keep reading the same letter.) And I am repeatedly taken to New Smyrna Beach in 1969 to a letter which begins “I’m devastated to hear that you no longer have your diction class…really, really devastated.” Even though the two sisters actually did not spend much time together during their lifetimes, they were obviously very close: this letter is addressed Ma chère petite soeur and signed Much love. So I am regularly devastated by proxy. Perhaps bending the spine into new creases would help.

My French language skills remain stubbornly at a level which usually dictates my reading choices are books I wouldn’t choose to read in English. John Green’s YA fiction is a challenge in French and the Dear Canada books, which are actually for much younger kids, strain my brain because they all have specific vocabulary suited to their historical settings (like girls living in a tuberculosis sanitarium or with fathers building the railroad through the mountains in the 19th century).

Languages of Our Land: Indigenous Poems and Stories from Québec (2014), edited by Susan Ouriou, includes some translations from the French by Christelle Morelli with source languages ranging from Wendat, Innu-aimun, Cree and Algonquin. The parallel translations are very helpful. One of the authors included here is Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau (I admired her Winter Child a great deal, which Ouriou and Morelli also translated) and I also read a slim volume of correspondence exchanged between her and François Lévesque.

Their letters in La bienveillance des ours are often about these authors own specific works but also about the craft of writing and how they have broached or avoided certain personal topics and life experiences in their creative work (but, also, when they have included autobiographical elements in their fiction).

Over time, their relationship grows. “Cette correspondance que nous amorçons, pour moi, c’est de l’oxygène littéraire, François writes to Virginia. “Je n’ai jamais partagé avec un autre écrivain les aléas, les difficultés ou les fulgarances de l’acte d’écrire. Geste si intime et si largement public en même temps,” Virginia writes to François.

Kaie Kellough’s Accordéon (2016) landed in my stack because I loved Dominoes at the Crossroards, which was on the Giller list last year. Accordéon is presented as a series of anonymous testimonials about sightings of a flying canoe in Montreal.

Not that the canoe is proven to exist; it’s an element of folklore, so no official statement has been issued and anyone reading these testimonials shouldn’t read anything into the decision to collect and record these anecdotes. Is it entertainment? Is it a comment on decolonization? Who knows. Maybe it’s an actual canoe, because there’s also a debate about what language(s) its voyageurs can speak while travelling. Ask Dany Laferriére—he was there. And check the footnotes, which actually run alongside the concise reports.

I was particularly pleased to find Dany Laferriére in Berri metro in Kaie Kellough’s novel, because I’d just finished reading Adam Leith Gollner’s Working in the Bathtub: Conversations with the Immortal Dany Laffiére (2020).

Laferriére clearly travels with a notebook on the metro and everywhere else, because he’s a prolific writer. (I’ve read four of his books but only discussed 1985’s How to Make Love to a Negro and 2009’s The Return here, both translated by David Homel.)

This was the case with The Return, which he describes as “first and foremost, a poetic book Whether the sections are in verse or in prose, it is poetic throughout.” He “wrote it all in verse” to begin with: “I wrote it in Port-au-Prince: standing up, walking down the street, in the car, sitting at friends’ places. But in transcribing the notebooks, I realized that the text I’d written needed some context and some explanation, and so the prose sections are more to provide context. The prose is the jewel-box, and the verse is the jewel.”

He’s a Haitian writer, living in exile: “I had always taken one basic precaution in Haiti, which was not to get myself killed by being an idiot.” And his birthplace fundamentally influences his being and his writing: “To be from Haiti, to be imbued with coffee, the scent of mangoes, the taste of avocados, the smell of leaves, of jasmine, or ylang-ylang: those things came from my birth. They weren’t things I had decided.”

But he also reaches beyond that, allowing his ideas to percolate and interweave, which is the aspect of his work that I most enjoy and admire: “All my ideas stay with me for a long time before seeing the light of day. What’s important is that an idea needs to find its place in the structure that I’ve been building for almost 40 years. I need to be able to link each book project to at least two other books.”

It’s Laferriére’s writing-eye, his ongoing work to connect, that draws me into his narratives. Even in The Return, there is so much about storytelling and, here, in a work dedicated to writing, I was flagging passages every couple of pages. Passages like this:

“I’m not scared when I can’t write. I just don’t write. I don’t have that issue. I can extricate myself from the writing. But I really like it when I’m in that second state, where you are no longer just yourself, where you are inhabited.”

What have you been reading in translation lately? If you consider yourself a CanLit reader, when did you last read a Québécois writer?