cloudy blood
★★★★
Robert Galbraith, translated from English by Florianne Vidal, Grasset, Paris 2022, 921 pages
Cormoran Strike and his partner Robin work on a “cold case”: an unexplained disappearance that occurred in the 1970s in London. At the time, we had not been able to prove the link with a sordid serial killer who raged in working-class neighborhoods, and the investigator had seen his sanity questioned. Shaken by life as much as by work, the two accomplices will manage to elucidate the affair. He was a serial killer, yes, but of a particularly unlikely kind. A captivating investigation, endearing characters, but be careful not to doze in the slightest: the big brick that is nearly 1000 pages could cause damage!
Michael Belair
island of happiness
★★★★
arit Törnqvist, translation from Dutch by Maurice Lomré, La joie de lire, Geneva, 2022, 80 pages. Starting from 7 years old
Whether you’re spending the summer on the island of Montreal, Isle-aux-Coudres or the Magdalen Islands, be sure to pack island of happiness, by Marit Tornqvist. In this existentialist fable, a young girl sails the open sea, alone on her boat: “Which direction should I take? Is the horizon still far away? These two questions govern her quest, during which she visits several islands, declining as many ways to inhabit the world and, incidentally, to find happiness. In this journey of few words, the illustrations combine watercolour, gouache, acrylic, ink and catch us. Magnificent, this small format album offers itself to us like a travel diary, creating an instant intimacy with the protagonist and her explorations. Sublime and captivating.
Yannick Marcoux
You demanded the evening
★★★★
Fabrice Colin, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 2022, 288 pages
Initiatory novel, partly autobiographical, You demanded the evening is probably the most personal book offered so far by the Frenchman Fabrice Colin. While the first half of the book offers an irresistible dark romanticism, where the narrator, at first an observer, almost a voyeur, then less and less exterior to the action, describes with sublime language the overwhelming embrace of Eros and Thanatos , the second part gradually lets the light take over. It’s time for truths to come out and accounts to be settled. The narrator reconnects with the forest, with his father, rediscovers what he was trying to flee, a heavy secret, infinite guilt, a fault to be expiated. The gaze plunged into that of a deer, the young man allows the trials to cross him, and no longer to determine him.
Christian Saint Pierre
Match.
★★★ 1/2
Lili Boisvert, VLB editor, Montreal, 2022, 192 pages
A woman, a man, and a relationship: unhealthy, abusive, toxic — as is the case with too many of them. This is the story of Émilie Martin – or, should we say, Lili Boisvert, as there are so many similarities between the protagonist and the author – a “strong woman” who swiped the bad boy. A man who had the potential to be the love of a lifetime, but instead turned out to be hell for a year and a half. Short punchy autofiction, Match. sheds harsh light on the perniciousness with which domestic violence too often sets in in a relationship. A book that you can read without stopping, except to catch your breath after the few glaring sentences of truth that dot the novel.
Maïka Yargeau
mansions
★★★★
Poetry, collages and paintings by Jean-Sébastien Huot, Hands Free Editions, Montreal, 2022, 96 pages
A man decides to return to his childhood home in search of his mother and his first sensations. To rediscover sensations, here is the project of the poet who tends to immerse himself in the sensitive, the dazzling. “The wind carries his empty back,” he says to embrace the ineffable feeling of existing. The memory of the mother, a bit Proustian, animates her: “She will have made a vow / To gather the quail bones / In a white circle / Flooding our rooms with chloroform / Tall grass and dew. It’s a great tenderness, fulfilled. If, by chance, he perceives a “perfume of peony in the stomach / [s]one heart explodes yellow”. Here is an almost happy collection, at least so finely designed, with the naive drawings of the author’s house, that summer is reborn illico.
Hugues Corriveau
people of the north
★★★★
Perrine Leblanc, Gallimard, Paris, 2022, 192 pages
In war as in love, literature lays the trap of artifice, overstatement, excess. In her third novel, Perrine Leblanc skillfully overcomes the pitfalls, and combines these two great impulses of life with the distance and sobriety of those who have experienced vertigo, fear, mourning, and who find in themselves the strength to do so. build the sequel. In 1991, at the heart of the conflict in Northern Ireland, a writer serving in the Republican army was executed on the outskirts of Belfast. In the wake of this event, a journalist falls in love with a young documentary filmmaker, unaware of the danger in which her fascination for the new martyr places her. Between secrets, threats and fiery reunions, the writer’s pen follows the contours of her universe and her characters until they blend in, bringing out the familiar in a story that is nonetheless extraordinary. Gorgeous.
Anne-Frederique Hébert-Dolbec
an old story
★★★★ 1/2
Susie Morgenstern and Serge Bloch, Sarbacane, Paris, 2022, 48 pages
This is the story of a little old woman. She used to read a lot, sew, embroider, knit, but she has run out of patience, her sight is failing and her fingers aren’t as nimble anymore. Time has passed, so she sits back in her chair and reminisces about the stories left behind. And she appreciates this old age, with no desire to be young again, to “go back the same way”. Published for the first time in 1985 – republished here by Sarbacane – An old story carries all the beauty of the world. The slowness of this granny at the end of her road leaves room for memories, but also for the present that she sometimes savors with her grandchildren, often alone in her apartment. Morgenstern’s poetry is accompanied by Bloch’s delicate illustrations, sensitive paintings, full of details, like the daily life presented. It’s beautiful to make you cry.
Marie Fradette
Take away the night
★★★★
Monique Proulx, Boreal, Montreal, 2022, 343 pages
Go and live, or stay and die? Inhabited by this dilemma, a young Hasidic Jew leaves his community and bets on a rebirth. The great Monique Proulx reconnects with one of her most endearing and fatally good characters, Markus Kohen. She brings him into the “Fresh World”, a universe that vibrates according to desires and privileges, crossed by so many humans in free fall. Can we reinvent ourselves from scratch, be free but without landmarks and at the mercy of everything? With the freshness conferred on him by his 20 years and the candor of an old child, Markus tames a foreign language to the point of getting drunk on words, and begins his reconstruction by working to “take the night away” from the desperate. A story of dignity and hope, a novel splashing with light, written in a vibrant, heart-connected style.
Marie Helene Poitras
Novice
★★★
Stéphane Dompierre, Quebec America, Montreal, 2022, 292 pages
“It looks to me like a nice gang of drug addicts who are going to yell until the wee hours while strumming their guitars, that. Tabouère, there are even two blacks! They brought their bongos there, that’s for sure. It’s going to be beautiful in time. Since when does it go in the woods, this world? “Launches Gilles, caricature of the white man on the right, to his wife Yolaine, a formidable little lady, when he sees the 11 influencers registered at the disconnection camp managed by Gabrielle and her older brother Mathieu. Happily twisting the codes of slasher, a sub-genre of horror, Stéphane Dompierre signs a caustic black comedy in which he mercilessly mocks the shortcomings of our technology-addicted society, sparing no one. On the menu: hilarious dialogues, comical situations and an atmosphere to give goosebumps.
Manon Dumais
What dies in us
★★★★
Mathieu Bélisle, Leméac, Montreal, 2022, 152 pages
In What dies in us, his third essay, Mathieu Bélisle asks the “question of meaning” and draws on the revealing experience of the pandemic to examine the special relationship that Quebecers have with old age and death. After the collapse of religious practice, between taboo and collective denial, smokescreens of figures and statistics, everything conspires in the capitalist order in which we live so that these questions do not interest us – the dead and the sick being bad consumers. Summoning Sophocles as well as René Girard, Romain Gary, Pierre Vadeboncoeur and even Tintin in Tibet, the essayist delivers a personal, sensitive and intelligent reflection through which he seeks, once again, to understand the world that is ours.
Christian Desmeules