On August 12, I buy a Quebec book | Our columnists recommend…

To add to your pile, here are three books that our columnists have read and approved.




Self-portrait of anotherby Elise Turcotte

A Quebec writer tries to better understand the life of her aunt, a little-known actress, friend of Réjean Ducharme, Pauline Julien and Gérald Godin, lover of Gaston Miron and wife of Alejandro Jodorowski, who went into exile in Paris then in Mexico, before dying tragically almost 40 years ago in Montreal. Self-portrait of another is not quite a novel, warns Élise Turcotte. Nor a story. It is a reflection on art, madness and the notion of muse, coupled with a fascinating foray into the process of creating an original work, about an equally original subject.

Self-portrait of another

Self-portrait of another

Alto

280 pages

The unsightly onesby Claudia Larochelle

The III collection of Québec Amérique invites authors to tell in three autofictional stories significant moments of their lives. With The Disgracefulses, the journalist and author Claudia Larochelle offers a narrator who reveals her strengths and weaknesses in a moving way, in her private, romantic and professional life, from adolescence to adulthood, in a pre-#metoo era. Some will recognize themselves in the lack of self-confidence and the unhealthy need to please that is exposed there, but also in a certain recovery of personal power, which does not evacuate vulnerability.

The Ungracious

The Ungracious

Quebec America, collection III

134 pages

The Last Tape — A Portrait of André Brassardby Olivier Choinière

This book is first and foremost the words of the theatre man André Brassard, those that he put on many cassettes before experiencing growing inertia. Olivier Choinière made a book and a play out of them, which was created in September 2023 at the Quat’Sous with the daring Violette Chauveau in the role of Brassard (the play will be revived there in November). This booklet is both a work of poetry and a biographical portrait. We follow André Brassard in his daily life where, between a cigarette and a Coke, he questions his life. Some passages are upsetting, as Brassard could be. “If you reread the contract you signed when you came into the world, it doesn’t say that it’s going to be easy. […] A human right? It’s not a right, it’s a coincidence.” A perfect fall read.

The Last Tape — A Portrait of André Brassard

The Last Tape — A Portrait of André Brassard

Workshop 10

104 pages


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