I feel a bit like my sports colleagues when they analyze hockey statistics. But this is not a match, there are no winners or losers, only the desire to clear up a little the enormous literary abundance of the last 25 years. My first reaction when I saw the results of our survey of around forty participants (we explain the methodology to you earlier in this issue) was to think that we should have made a list of 50, or even 100 “new classics”, rather than just 25. But that would have been too heavy for a newspaper, we would have to design a magazine for that!
My second reaction, self-centered and prideful, was to check if there were titles I had never read in there. Only one, finally: It was raining birds by Jocelyne Saucier. No idea why, I’ve seen the film, but it’s time I read it. This is also a bit of what I hope this list provokes: an intense need to catch up.
If so, we won’t need to go back very far in time. What is striking in the results is a “recency effect”.
We would have thought that the closer we got to the 2020s, the fewer books cited there would be, that we would have taken refuge in safe values confirmed by time, but on the contrary, our participants did not hesitate to place them in good stead. position of very recent publications. It’s not a question of failing memory, there seems to be a real turning point in the 2010s.
Of the 25 books on our list, only one belongs to the years 2000-2004: Damn by Nelly Arcan. There are some six for 2005-2009, five for 2010-2014, eight for 2015-2019… and still five for 2020-2024! Personally, I did not dare to go beyond 2020…
This is a trend that is also confirmed in our long list of all books mentioned in total, which contains 158 titles. More than half of the titles cited date from the last 10 years.
I can already hear grumbling about the obvious dominance of the novel in this list of new classics. This is a legitimate criticism that has been brewing for several years in the Quebec literary community, where the “traditional” novel overshadows all other genres, in media coverage or prices, for example. Of our 25 new classics, there is only one collection of poetry – Message sticks: Tshissinuatshitakana by Joséphine Bacon –, only a comic strip – Paul in Quebec by Michel Rabagliati – and two essays: The boys club by Martine Delvaux and The habit of ruins by Marie-Hélène Voyer. So yes, romantic fiction dominates, but I want to ask this question: which novel are we talking about exactly? If we think of Victor Hugo or Émile Zola, few titles in this list come close to this traditional form, because the novel has undergone an enormous change in Quebec, enough to sometimes find it embarrassing to write it on a cover, so much so that form has become hybrid. Is it that Damn by Nelly Arcan, Where I hide by Caroline Dawson, Ru by Kim Thúy or Paper towns by Dominique Fortier are really “traditional” novels? I don’t think so. Moreover, Fortier is the only one who sees two of her books (Paper towns And At the peril of the sea) appear in the ranking.
Of course I had disappointments. I would have liked Marie-Claire Blais to be higher in the list, and I think she was disadvantaged by a division of the vote between her different titles. Thirstshis cycle of ten novels. For what The sea of tranquility by Sylvain Trudel is not there? Or The diver by Stéphane Larue? Or the James Joyce of VLB?
But what I really liked about this exercise is that we didn’t necessarily choose our “favorites”, rather what we felt could belong to a possible literary canon. Being a simple participant among around forty people in good faith made me even more curious to discover the results.
And I must say that apart from one or two titles that I will not name so as not to make enemies, I find that these 25 books which are emerging correspond perfectly to this idea of a new classic. In the sense that, if a foreigner completely ignorant of our literature asked me to offer him 25 books that represent contemporary Quebec literature, I would not be embarrassed to offer him exactly this list.
There is a beautiful parity between men and women, a real and very high-ranking presence of diversity. We will notice that the first three places are held by female authors, something that we would perhaps not have seen in the 20th century.e century…
The question of not only French-Canadian identity runs through this list with Dawson, Laferrière, Thúy, Fontaine, Farah, Chacour, Bacon… As if they had written a history of Quebec that we collectively needed. It’s not to be nice and fill quotas, because these authors have been totally adopted by the readership here (and even elsewhere). I rather believe that they respond to something that we find important, and that only literature, outside the media noise and the belching of social networks, is capable of speaking to us about these themes in an intelligent, sensitive and complex way. For example, Kukum by Michel Jean, who has just appeared on the cover of LQ magazine, has contributed to transforming the mentality of Quebecers towards Aboriginal people. The uninterrupted success of The woman who fled by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, who can be heard on stage at TNM these days, bridged the gap between generations.
These results are necessarily due to the fact that we had this concern for parity from the start when we contacted the people who participated in this project. I am convinced that if we had asked 40 other people for their lists, while maintaining this concern, we would probably have had several titles in common. Because these books changed Quebec.