On the occasion of the day “I buy a Quebec book” which will be held on Friday, our journalists have selected three books from here to devour.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
“I have never read Baudelaire”
It is in the brand new Draisine collection, from Éditions XYZ, that we discovered this short novel by Jocelyne Saucier. We are in Clova, a village in northern Quebec where mail and groceries arrive by rail. But Clova is also a central piece ofLost trainthe author’s previous novel, and the new, although independent, reveals a new facet of this journey in the poetic and bewitching universe of train enthusiasts.
“I have never read Baudelaire”
Jocelyn Saucier
XYZ Editions
64 pages
fancy molasses
The breath that animates this first novel by Francis Ouellette, published by La Mèche, risks knocking you down. The author handles with verve and ingenuity a popular language, deeply rooted in orality and oddly colorful. By taking us through the ill-famed streets and alleys, the dilapidated buildings and the poached populace of the “Faubourg à la m’asse”, it is more than a portrait of a neighborhood that tears up, but a real identity reappropriation where ugliness, misery and abuse rub shoulders with a terrible beauty, the one that continues to exist in the darkest corners of existence.
fancy molasses
Francis Ouellette
The Wick
224 pages
My beginnings in eternity
It would be easy, and above all not very original, to reproach Gilles Archambault for almost always writing the same book. But that would be to omit the essential: it is better to have a style and obsessions of one’s own, then to stick to it, than to render an indistinct prose. The short and impeccable news of this 45e title are once again populated by men and women who welcome death little by little, and for whom self-mockery is a kind of elementary elegance, the least overwhelming of the modalities of despair. What if drawing up a list of their laughable inconsistencies was like an ultimate life drive for them?
My beginnings in eternity
Gilles Archambault
boreal
136 pages