Professor of literature at McGill from 1971 to 2010, a biting and lucid essayist (The lyrical generation, Agnes’ last afternoon, There literature despite everything), director for nearly 40 years of the “Papiers collés” collection at Boréal, biographer of Gabrielle Roy, far-sighted reader and friend of Milan Kundera, whose postface each of the novels published in paperback, François Ricard bowed out in February 2022 No wonder the review The Novel Workshop, of which this discreet heavyweight of Quebec letters was a faithful collaborator, devotes its last issue to him. From André Major to Lakis Proguidis, from Isabelle Daunais to the Greek novelist Yannis Kiourtsakis, friends and colleagues came in large numbers to underline the proverbial modesty, the “inflexible realism” and the “well-tempered verb” of this great critic. He who, as Kundera wrote in 1985 in his preface to Literature against it-eveninhabited “the world novel as one lives in a house”.
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