25 years minimum | The Press

Less than a week before the Paris Book Festival where Quebec will be the guest of honor, we will soon see Quebec authors everywhere in the French media.

In any case, journalists were working in advance for this coverage, because my colleague Dominic Tardif and I offered a short 101 course on Quebec literature to a contingent of journalists passing through Montreal recently. We weren’t the only ones on their program: they went on an intense trip to visit writers and publishing houses, and were even treated to a tour of Square Saint-Louis with Dany Laferrière.

I told them that my career as a journalist began at the end of 1999, and that from the start, I was assigned to Quebec literature for which there was not much rush at the time. That without knowing it, I was embarking on a great adventure, at a turning point in publishing in Quebec, when new houses and new voices appeared. A real changing of the guard and vision, which brings us today to harvest time and a particularly attractive maturity.

I repeat it often, but in 2000, far fewer Quebec books were read in Quebec, and the trend was reversed in a quarter of a century. If foreign publishing still has a lot of weight in book sales here, the BTLF/Gaspard results for 2023 remind us that of the 10 best-selling books of the year, 9 are Quebec editions, all genres combined; the only foreign book that sits at the top of the list is the latest Asterix, which is still a global phenomenon.

At the end of this presentation where I hope that we have answered our colleagues’ questions well, Jean-Baptiste Passé, general director of the Paris Book Festival, pointed out to me that I started my career just after the Paris Book Fair of 1999, the last time that Quebec was the guest of honor. I had a moment of emotion thinking of everything that local writers have made me experience over 25 years, impossible to summarize in an hour. I almost inflicted the Hi joke on him! Ha! Tremblay, “25 years minimum! ”, but I held back.

Yes, 25 years minimum, until Paris renews its invitation (and its interest) for letters from La Belle Province.

The context of 2024 is very different from that of 1999. I have the impression that the Quebec book world is flattered and happy with this invitation, but that it is not going there with the feeling of playing its future as before. In any case, it is not just Paris that invites us, there is also Angoulême and Saint-Malo, recently Brussels, Frankfurt, Geneva, Rabat, and in 2026, Gothenburg, in Sweden.

My colleagues laughed at me when I Googled Gothenburg, which at the same time revealed my ignorance of Scandinavian thrillers. But if readers love these detective stories in the Nordic countries, why couldn’t the Héliotrope black collection experience the same craze, since Quebec is also a Nordic country? Olga Duhamel-Noyer, who runs the house with Florence Noyer, told me. Héliotrope plans to establish itself in France this year, like other Quebec houses which have managed to do well in recent years – think of La Peuplade, Mémoire d’encrier or Le Quartanier.

We are invited because we are interesting and not in the hope that someone will be interested in us. Dany Laferrière, Dominique Fortier, Kevin Lambert, Éric Chacour, Kim Thúy, Hélène Dorion, Denise Desautels, Michel Jean and Julie Doucet, being celebrated in France in recent years, have set the table. A curiosity is developing towards our literature, and today I would dare to say our literatures. I will never believe that I witnessed the birth of the written word of the First Nations, which also greatly fascinates Europeans. Something is being written here on the fringes of our obvious cul-de-sacs, which gives, I dare to believe, a taste of the future.

I went to reread many articles published in 1999 about the Paris Book Fair which had Quebec in the spotlight. The excitement was at its height, around 400 people, including 185 writers, had made the trip to France where the Spring of Quebec in Paris was also going to be held, which was less successful than the writers’ meeting. Politicians were a lot of the conversation, which I see less of right now. We had many hopes around this event where we wanted to change the image of Quebec literature, perceived as “picturesque”.

Next week, more than 70 writers (including 42 from the honorary delegation) and around sixty representatives from publishing houses will be at the Paris Book Festival. It is a little more modest than in 1999, and expectations are rather realistic according to Geneviève Pigeon, president of ANEL.

“I think the expectations are built around duration, rather than a fad. It’s more of a step, a step towards the objectives to be achieved, rather than an end in itself,” she adds.

In 1999, there was of course some dispute, particularly regarding the considerable weight of Boréal/Dimédia in the organization of the event. Its director, Pascal Assathiany, who was president of ANEL at that time, declared to the magazine Weekly Books : “A Quebec author is a foreign author in France. In his own country he is best served by a local publisher. » This is still true today, perhaps even more so.

In 1999, the writers who had attracted the attention of the media were Gaétan Soucy, Dany Laferrière, Robert Lalonde, Monique Proulx, Sergio Kokis or Neil Bissoondath, but those who sold the most copies in France were Arlette Cousture, Yves Beauchemin and Denise Bombardier, sometimes more than the established Quebec writers such as Hébert, Ducharme, Tremblay, Poulin or Blais.

Twenty-five years later, who will be in the spotlight? In the official delegation, unless I’m mistaken, I believe that only Dany Laferrière and Hélène Dorion were part of the 1999 adventure, all the others are new faces.

The history of literature is also written outside of books, by witnesses like me who have no other ambition than to fill the archives and provide possible footnotes. For readers of The Press, and to add a chapter to my memoirs, I will fly to Paris with my heart in the shape of a library, and in my head, memorable memories that span a quarter of a century.

Here are a few of them: Nelly Arcan and Guillaume Vigneault flamboyant at a chic Boréal launch in the early 2000s, crying with Catherine Mavrikakis at our first interview, Jacques Poulin in Quebec who gives me a eucalyptus handkerchief to treat my flu, an unforgettable trip to Victor-Lévy Beaulieu in Trois-Pistoles where he burned his book The big tribe in her wood stove to protest against the decline of the independence movement, discover Joséphine Bacon in Haiti during a writers’ trip organized by Rodney Saint-Éloi, the courage of Vickie Gendreau, a drunken evening with the designer Valium at Cheval Blanc , 10 years of magnificent poets at the Voix d’Amériques Festival, my first interview with Alain Farah in the cafeteria of The Press where he talked a lot about the series Scoopa moving weekend in Charlevoix with Simon Roy who wanted to enjoy life to the end despite his cancer, an earthquake in Haiti with Dany Laferrière, two trips to Key West to see Marie-Claire Blais and Michel Tremblay , call Dominique Fortier very early in the morning to congratulate her on her Renaudot prize, chase Kevin Lambert for an entire autumn, catch a virus every year at the Montreal Book Fair and dance despite everything at the party Off-Salon with the writers…

To be honest, I’ve only experienced happiness for 25 years, minimum !

Precision :
A previous version of this text mentioned the book “The Great Scrum” instead of “The Great Tribe”. Our apologies.