If you’d prefer to watch the conversation (and if you’re going to watch only one episode, I’d recommend this one), you can find it on along with . You can watch the April 8th episode (covering pages 156-202) . And you can discuss this book at the reactivated Goodreads .

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And follow Patrick on and .

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions. And you can get 20% off����by using the code 2MONTH at checkout.

You can also support this podcast and��all��of Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

You can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to It really helps people to discover the podcast.

If you’d prefer to watch the conversation, you can find it on along with . Next week’s episode (up to page 621) will be broadcast live . And you can discuss this book at the reactivated Goodreads .

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And follow for lots of hot takes on books, cheating in sports, and more.

Be sure to order Brian’s book, , which is now officially available at better bookstores everywhere thanks to BOA Editions

You can also support this podcast and��all��of Open Letter’s activities by making a tax-deductible donation through the .

You can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to It really helps people to discover the podcast.

Only two episodes left! And because Chad’s going to be in London for a week, we’ll be broadcasting one more��episode on YouTube this week. (The audio podcast version will release as usual on Thursday 9/19.) That said, here are links to the final two YouTube streams: (pgs 360-406), and (pgs 407-448).

Also, all of our past episodes are available on our in case you want to catch up on anything.

This week’s music is “” by Hallelujah the Hills.

Season 10 will be the first English-language title to be included, , which was just named to the Booker SHORTLIST!!

Follow and for random thoughts and information about upcoming guests. And follow Patrick on and for hot takes and pictures of Vermont bookstores.

And be sure to preorder Brian’s book,��, which is coming out this fall from BOA Editions.

You can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to It really helps people to discover the podcast.

P.T. Smith reads, writes, and lives in Vermont.

��by Frankétienne, translated from the French by Asselin Charles (Haiti, University of Virginia)

Every year, the BTBA introduces me to books I’d otherwise completely miss. Whether it’s because I read it while a judge, because it’s on the longlist, or because I had the wildly fun advantage of watching them discuss these books and some lodged in my head, like Asselin Charle’s translation of Frankétienne’s ��é�����ھ�. It was one of a few books rooting to make the longlist despite not having read it. I’ve read Frankétienne before, apparently, though I remember nearly nothing of Ready to Burst. Ultravocal has been forthcoming from Archipelago for what seems like years. He’s the master of Haitian literature. This is a “zombie” novel. How can you not root for that?

My copy arrived after the longlist was announced and I dove in. I started it at the same time I was reading another book on the list. ��é�����ھ� took over, and that’s nothing against that unnamed book, but Frankétienne just gives us that damn good of a book. And the reason it should win this year is because this is a book only the BTBA could recognize. The entire longlist is a demonstration of how special and full of variety this award is.

Let’s get the fun, and deceptive, pitch out of the way first. This novel has zombies! It’s the second book on a BTBA longlist to have zombies! But this was also written in 1975. It’s not zombies as we know them. It’s not a literary novel playing with genre tropes to make high-minded people feel comfortable reading about monsters, spaceships, of fantasy kingdoms. The zombies are mostly called zonbis, and they’re humans who have had their soul stolen by a sorcerer, a Vodou priest. These are Haitian zombies, a parable for poor, abused workers, not George Romero’s zombies, and certainly nothing like modern and increasingly desperate attempts to add some new spin to zombies. Instead ��é�����ھ� is straightforward in that Frankétienne has no interest in saying something about the idea of zombies, but instead they are just the perfect and natural fit to the story he’s telling. These zonbis were made, they exist, they suffer, and they will have their revenge. Despite this warning about ��é�����ھ�, something remains true: the BTBA has no hesitation paying attention to genre. Last year’s winner is packed full of sci-fi elements. This is a literary award that embraces genre as an element of literature alongside any style, trick, tool, device, whatever.

What else is it that makes ��é�����ھ� deserve to win the title this year? How about that it’s simultaneously an immensely complex and challenging novel and an engaging read? It’s got sections in italics, the voice of the zonbis: “Sleep rise look walk eat lick finger blow fall run spend the day hungry. Talk nonsense. Tongue heavy. Tongue shredded in a thousand pieces. Full belly. Twisted guts. Thirsty for water.” The writing here can be fragmented, with partial lines, and spaced across the page, calling to mind poetry. It’s the collective voice of a people crying out. They want to be heard. They want their souls back. They are also a voice of Haitian tradition, the crossroads, dance. These sections are the most romantic sections, beautiful and fun and strange. They give the zonbis empathy: “Our skins are raw. We’re wounded to our bones.”

The most accessible, straightforward, plot-based narrative is in normal font and tells the story of humans involved with the zonbis, including the sorcerer Sintil and his, uh, daughter/servant/inappropriate relationship, Siltana, and the assistant Zofè. Siltana will fall in love with one of the zonbis, feed him salt to “poison” him by making him strong, leading to rebellion. The writing here is still beautiful and wild and unique, but it’s also where we learn how zonbis are made, the past of the hero zonbi Klodonis, and where the love story between him and Siltana comes through.

The final of the three main types of narrative is in bold text, with slashes to break up lines: “All roads cross in the woods / we rise up early / ass kissing flatterers go a long way / even with a single match you can light a fire /a dandy at the cockfight / gamecocks fight / we break our backs working” These are a bit of everything: the story; the zonbi’s lives, the cockfighting celebration. They’re a song of Haiti, the spine of this book.

There are other types of text, and there are section breaks, and a diagram. It’s complex is what I’m saying. It’s intricate in that way where as you read you feel that there are connections everywhere, that the book is overgrown with details and references and ties between sections and lines and ideas and characters and Haitian traditions and history. You feel it. You make out what you can. You don’t have to see the way the intricacies work to be rewarded with the pleasure they give off. The ride is a the point, and the whole way, you know that you could go deeper, work harder, read closer, reread.

So: genre, joyous, welcoming, yet difficult literature. What else makes for a BTBA book? I’m no Chad Post, so I haven’t looked at any numbers, I have no charts, no actual data, but I’m still going to claim that BTBA is one of the most diverse awards out there, each and every year. In terms of gender of the authors and translators, in terms of language, country of origin, time period, etc., I don’t believe any award cooks up lists like these ones.

Let’s make another claim: a fairly diverse award list isn’t that hard to make. You’re gonna want to start with the judges. Get some different tastes, different perspectives and backgrounds. Then you’re gonna want to make the longlist long. It helps. And this isn’t just throwing a bone out to some books to pad out a list and make it diverse. Naw, not only are all the books on the longlist each year books some judges are passionate about, books that start as longshots that barely made the list often go on to make the short list…and maybe win?

Throughout the year, the judges comment on a spreadsheet where every eligible translation is listed. All books are assigned to a judge to read, workload neatly distributed. This means they are reading books they would never otherwise never come across, they’re giving it a chance it might not otherwise get. These are the books they want to find. The books that would always get their attention will still get it, but the spreadsheet helps those other books.

The judges want to find books like Dead Rose, ��é�����ھ�, Congo, Inc., and Slave Old Man. They read and they discuss with intentionality. I watched these discussions happen. There’s a ­����������­ for a diverse list. That desire is there because it’s how they read. They read with admirable openness, wanting new, wanting challenges. Diverse literature is a leap towards those things. The judges are seeking the best translated books on offer. What that means, they determine, with as many contributing factors as they want. With some judges, the intentionality towards diversity is greater than others. This is a good thing. No one is reading with an agenda, no one is forcing anything, but with honesty, passion, discussion, and varied intentions, a special award list rises.

��é�����ھ� is representative of what the BTBA can accomplish. Of the type of book it can help readers uncover. It’s the first novel written in Kreyòl. It’s brilliant, both structurally and as a story. The translation is wonderful (there are a few occasions where Charles adds a footnote, explaining a meaning and most of the time it’s not necessary because he nailed the translation already). It’s culturally important, both to Haiti and to anyone interested in world literature. Pulling a quote the afterword from Frankétienne himself, “��é�����ھ� was first of all for me an aesthetic literary experience at the level of the Creole language. ��é�����ھ� is first and foremost the novel of the Haitian language, but as a language is indissolubly linked to the becoming, to the destiny, the lived situation of a people.” He created a work of art in the language of the people, as an aesthetic and a political act. Charles has given that book to us in English. It deserves victory.

This is my last post for Quebec month at Three Percent. My last Tuesday spending the day on and off writing about a book from Quebec, walking the dog, reading something else, editing at the bar, and going to bed. It’s not a bad Tuesday. I’ll miss Quebec month. I’m also going to end it on a different note. When Chad asked me for recommendations, I gave him three classics, and then the most recent book from the province I’d read. So it’s not a classic. It’s only from 2017 and the translation is from last year. It’s not even a recent read for me anymore. There’s a couple between Chad’s ask and now. But plans can be nice, and I’m sticking with this one. So, what do I have to say about Oana Avasilichioaei’s translation of Catherine Lalond’s ? Plenty, because I both love and I’m lost in it. Love and lost? That might be how I prefer to be.

The original was nominated for the Governor General’s, one of the highest awards in Canadian literature. It was nominated in the poetry category, even though the publisher, Le Quartanier, lists it as a novel, and Book*hug lists their English edition as a novel. The second you open it up, it makes sense why some call it poetry. Most pages have a single block of text, with plenty of white space on all sides. Occasionally, a line breaks off into emptiness before picking up again, that white expanse between asking you to make something of it. Some pages only have a single sentence, or a few words. The only time that the text runs from the top of the page to the bottom, it’s a speech that looks . . . well, a hell of a lot like poetry.

I’m not interested in identifying what label is most useful or most accurate, but I sure am interested in letting you know it playfully, comfortably, floats between identities. This fluidity isn’t just because Lalonde is skillful enough to manage the flow, but it’s the essence of the book, of the sprite at its heart. Most importantly, it means if you want to recommend it to someone who likes novels, tell them it’s a novel, if they prefer poetry, tell them it’s poetry, and if it’s someone who goes on and on about hybrid forms, just put it in their mouth. It’s a slim book, they’ll be fine.

I wanted to review this when it came out, but never managed it. I haven’t been writing much, especially not straightforward, formal reviews where I lay out a way to read the book, some flaws and some failures, make sure to land a not-completely-generic point about the translation, have a conclusion, and edit tightly. I haven’t been all that interested in reading things before they come out to make sure that review is ready to run right around release date. Those are the non-specific reasons I didn’t write about The Faerie Devouring before this. There are loads of excuses particular to this book, coming from its qualities and my inadequacies.

I noted that it’s close to prose poetry. This guy has no idea how to read poetry. See any and all of Chad’s posts on his own failings with poetry. It’s me. More important than that though, Faerie is a painful, wrenching, violent (not in the way you may think), feminine book. And I hesitate to even call it feminine, because it’s not that in any older, traditional meaning of the word, but I don’t know what else to call it. I don’t think Lalonde would disagree, I’m not sure anyone would . . . but I’m a dude trying to talk about a very poetic book that is about a wild, wild, visceral, honest expression of femininity, one that is among many things, a rage against the identity that culture puts on femininity, and eventually an embrace of womanhood specific to one woman. So what in the fuck do I get to write about that?

Okay: plot. A daughter is born. Mother dies in childbirth. Her family is her grandmother and five boys: “John-Jude the adopted eldest, JJ her pride and joy; the brat Peter-Joseph, JJ’s son, JJ, the precocious papa; James the mongoloid, adopted with; her own Luke; and the late-born Matthew.” The novel opens with her birth, “After the clamour of flesh, after the bloody harvest of the mound—liver, spleen, entrails, adorable arteries—the little mound more torn out than pushed, uprooted by the neighbour’s skilled hands.” The first section, the birth, with extended descriptions like that one, faces, bodies, builds up to five words Gramma says, five words spoken after it’s all over, “Fuck. It’s a girl.”

It’s a curse to be a girl, isn’t it? It’s a condemnation to a certain existence. This is a bodily book, relentlessly physical and graphic, and doesn’t a woman’s body come with punishment for being a woman? That’s not rhetorical. Isn’t that a thing many women feel? God I’m out of my element.

I’m convinced I’m not making it up by this though:

Gramma’s waiting for the prophesy, waiting to see the sprite join the military ranks of flesh and fresh fillies: waiting for her to return dried out, old; for her to return erased if not dead, like all women: of shame, rape, anemia, famine, TB, Pythia, family, restraint, embarrassment, hate, silence, dead from stitching, breastfeeding, ass-wiping, dead at the bottom of the lake, foot caught in the trap, ring on the finger—living dead like all the others all the same. Dead from living. Like all women.

Lalonde isn’t always that direct. Instead, like the title suggests, she takes the language of the fairy tale. But does she make it hers. Early on, the girl’s name is basically lost: “even lets her suck cow milk off her callused fingers. Nipples are for the rich. Rock-a-bye baby slurps the taste of hair dung and soil, then gets the runs of jaundice. Three times she gets it, and the sprite toughs it out. The sprite—the name sticks.”

I’ll come back to this novel as a fairy tale, but as much as this straddles, or moves between, prose and poetry, it does the same for other boundaries between genres. The family lives a rural life, seemingly devoid of any organization except the wrath of Gramma: school, work, law, hardly exist. In it’s own distinct way, the book is also an idyll:

It drags on, disharmony for a quackgrass orchestra, while the rest work on napping or rock skipping. The sprite loses interest, fidgets, knots, braids, plaits fragile grass effigies, amulets with dandelion faces and green-wheat arms. The redhead catches ladybugs for her, squishing them to make eyes.

It’s a vicious and nasty book, and god I love it.

Anything I could say about Faerie Devouring is better served by the book itself.

Best description of Gramma? “Gramma slurps with pleasure when it’s Ass Lake chowder night, and in her devouring, her lips soften, her face loses its ravenous wicked faerie godmother look.” That’s an entire page, by the way.

What does a happy family look like? “The six-headed monster scampers around, turns into a tornado, a wild herd, a caterpillar of linked legs: the spritely papoose bareback on the mongoloid, the brat behind putting on airs, the older ones jumping over the hurdle, turning a sharp corner.”

It’s a coming-of-age novel: “She’s thirteen, the sprite, and her first rootword rings clear, her first word, her true love. No. No. Who will be will know, who will know will see and what I’ll be will wart.”

Do I need to quote anything else to show that this is an insane, unique book? That to write it takes a passionate author, wild, brilliant, and free, and that the translator must be all those things too?

It’s almost dull that I like this book as much as I do, cause I’m a sucker. I’m a sucker for books as visceral as this one. Literary work that has piss, shit, vomit, sex, masturbation, and blood? I’m almost certainly game. An all-time favorite quote for me is from Zündel’s Exit: “That’s life, my life anyway, chains, falls, scrapes, and I’m afraid I pissed myself as well.” But often, it’s old hat. Here, it’s new. It’s a woman’s body and mind that has all this going on. It’s different. #readwomen. Not because it’s a moral good, but because I don’t want the same thing again and again and again.

“She pisses standing up to see herself flow, yellow streams her odour has changed.” “And fucking? Another story. A story of no more rump or gristle, only shitting or finding something to feed the mouth and the belly. The sprite comes, makes them come and returns to the chaos, like backwash.” “the sprite, force-fed with memories, the return of sensations, masturbates frantically all at once, as quietly as possible, standing up against the closed door of the boy’s room, comes immediately, comes with the solar speed of the solitary orgasm that remains one of her great, great secrets.”

Masturbation seems like a fine place to end. I could go on. But I can’t. No bit does it justice. Fragments entice, but the whole is another thing. The whole is something that as a dude, I’m not sure I can grasp, but I can work towards it. Something in my will fail Faerie Devouring. I’m okay with that. I can love it anyway. I do. You will? If you do, if you don’t, I want to hear from you. This is chick lit for the insane, intense, intelligent, angry, raging against the world literary crowd? I might get yelled at for that, I think, but in a good way.

My final other recommendations. For another book I couldn’t grasp because it’s abstracted out of my reach, another book that is strange and metaphorical (it’s set in a giant structure where families live in cells?) but also grounded and physical and intense: Karoline Georges’s��Under the Stone. Hey! Lalonde blurbed it. It’s translated by Jacob Homel, which brings me to How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired, Dany LaFerrière’s novel, translated by David Homel, Jacob’s father. I haven’t read it yet, not even started it, but it’s next for me. He’s Haitian-Canadian. Or Haitian-Quebecois. Cultures within cultures. I’m eager to dive in.

In 1964, Hubert Aquin was arrested on charges of illegal possession of a firearm, the and apparently police he was a revolutionary. While held in a psychiatric hospital in Montreal for four months, he wrote . The narrator of Next Episode is a man held in a psychiatric hospital in Montreal, writing a first-person spy thriller about a man from Montreal who is a political revolutionary. It’s a short, strange book. It’s philosophical, it’s absurdly rambly, another book where the narrator is chasing, chasing his thoughts, desperate to order them, language running itself away from him. In the beginning, the narrator in the hospital attempting to write and the narrator in Geneva battle for space. The first fights to give life, to find a way to free himself in some form, and eventually it becomes almost a straightforward quickly-paced, tense thriller, at times.

I wrote about Aquin for back when I first read him, taking on both Next Episode and . I remember nothing of what I wrote, and my past self is always an ignorant moron wholly unaware of what he’s writing, so I refuse to revisit it. If you want, .

Last week, in my P.S. note, I acknowledged Sheila Fischman as the GOAT when it comes to translators from Quebec. Guess who translated the version of Next Episode I’m familiar with? There’s an earlier translation, but I’ll stick with hers. I also should have noted that while she didn’t translate Kamouraska, she did much of Hébert’s other work that has made it to English.

This is a little bit of a different recommendation than my posts on Ducharme and Hébert. Aquin is classic too, but a little less central, from my outside viewpoint. A little more of a literary oddball. If Ducharme’s image is the myth of the recluse Aquin’s has the myth of the rebel and the suicide: he killed himself at forty-seven. He was expressly political, unlike those two . . . I think. In the 60s, when he was arrested, he was a member of the Quebec liberation movement, though not the more radical FLQ (Quebec Liberation Front). Infinite Jest may play the idea of Quebec liberation as a joke, but in the 60s and culminating in the October Crisis in 1970, it was not.

I do something a little bit, a little slightly but not totally, dishonest with this novel. I recommend it to anyone who likes Jean-Patrick Manchette. It’s a little dishonest because if anyone ever takes me up on it, in the early pages—when it’s mostly a possibly insane man obsessed with revolution, independence, language, and love is writing about trying write a novel while barely maintaining a line of thought—they’re going to be confused to all hell as what I was going on about:

Real novels I leave to the real novelists. As for me, I flatly refuse to bring algebra into my invention. Condemned to a certain ontological incoherence, I take my stand. I’m even turning it into a system with an immediate application that I decree. Infinite I shall be, in my own way and in the literal sense. I won’t a system I create for the sole purpose of never leaving it.

Yet . . . most of the people I know who like Manchette would also like Next Episode. There are similarities. I’m not completely misleading them. The people I know are also the type to be drawn in by the oddities, the madness, of Next Episode. And when the thriller takes off, they’ll see the Manchette. In my head, there are maps of literature, and Aquin and Manchette share an open border. Along that border violence and the political are a conjoined part of life, or at least a place sympathetic to the possibility of violence as a political path for the underdog, the one confined by those with power.

Early on, our narrator is trying to figure out how to write this thriller. What sentences should be like, what the plot should be, who the characters are:

As quickly as I can, I eliminate any behavior that would give my secret agent too much merit: he’s neither a Sphinx nor a highly perceptive Tarzan, neither God not the Holy Ghost; he musn’t be so logical that the plot need not be or, on the other hand, so lucid that I can complicate everything else and cook up some story that makes no sense, that when all’s said and done would only be understood by some bungling oaf with a gun who doesn’t share his thoughts with anyone.

As he struggles, moving back and forth from the psychiatric institute to the plot, the propulsive madness of his language overlaps the two. The narrator exists both as the spy and as the man in the hospital. Aquin is having fun, I need to be clear. He’s mad and wild and angry but he’s having fun.

The spy is given a mission by another invention of the narrator, a man named Hamidou Diop. He is to find and kill a man who may have (there is no certainty here) cut off the FLQ’s Swiss bank account. After meeting with K, the revolutionary’s lover, this book’s version of the femme fatale, he acquires a car, and flies off on mountain roads. On his way, the language of the writer and the spy overlap:

Time passes and I take forever to cross the Col des Mosses. Each turn surprises me in third gear when I should have already started to gear down; each sentence disconcerts me. I burn words, stages, memories, and I keep freeing myself from the tracery of this interpolated night. The event that’s already too far ahead of me will unfold shortly . . .

Aquin is having fun. It’s his fun. It’s weird. It matters. It’s sincere. It’s not like this book is laugh out loud funny, but man: “I needed to think up a quick retort, and since I no longer had a weapon to draw, I’d have to empty my dialectical magazine on this stranger who was standing between me and the daylight.”

Next Episode is a thriller, but also, somehow, nothing really happens. It’s a book of passionate desire for action, a raging need to attack the world, change it, free the individual from confinement, and free a nation under the rule of another nation. It’s also a book of confusion, of paralysis and impossibility, anxious desire for action but absolutely inability to act. Identity doesn’t work. Our revolutionary is kidnapped, he escapes, he kidnaps his kidnapper, he escapes. At no point is he sure that the other man is indeed his target, they go so far as to tell each other the same lies, or one lies and the other mirrors with truth. Even when our revolutionary breaks into his enemies’ house to wait for him, with the aim of finally killing him, he’s uncertain about everything.

I’m going on and on, aren’t I? This is a . . . unique book? It’s somehow stranger than I remember. It’s a love story, but the identity of that lover, K., is another identity without certainty. The love too is political:

What triumph there was in that night! What violent and sweet foretaste of the national revolution was unfolding on that narrow bed awash in colours and our two bodies naked, blazing, united in their rhythmic madness. Again tonight my lips hold the damp taste of your boundless kisses.

It’s simultaneously a political allegory and blatantly straightforward that its protagonist is a violent political separatist working for Quebec independence from Canada. At times, when our man from Montreal is walking around Geneva, being idle and paranoid, it’s the novel of a flâneur. It’s a novel about writing a novel. It’s a goddamned Quebec book. Its entire attitude, it is Quebec:

Within myself, explosive and depressed, an entire nation grovels historically and recounts its lost childhood in bursts of stammered words and scriptural raving, and then, under the dark shock of lucidity, suddenly begins to weep at the enormity of the disaster, at the nearly sublime scope of its failure.

P.S.: It’s impossible for me to not tag in Alain Farah’s Ravenscrag, translated by Lazer Lederhendler (which I reviewed for ). Another novel with blended narratives, this time in two time periods. It’s about MK-Ultra. (Isn’t that enough of a pitch? It is for me.) It’s about the absolutely insane experiments actually done by a doctor at McGill. It also features another version of Next Episode’s Hamidou Diop. Jason Freure wrote about this revival of Diop for the . Read Boundary too, by Andrée Michaud in Donald Winkler’s translation. A much more straightforward literary crime novel set in the woods on the border between Quebec and Maine. A book I thought was pretty good when I read it . . . and months later I realized was more than that and I need to read more Michaud. And Donald Winkler? He’s not only married to Sheila Fischman, but contends with her for that GOAT title.

It’s rare that I reread anything. There’re far too much sitting on my shelves and piled in stacks on my floor. I also hardly remember any details of things I’ve read. I can tell you something about why I liked a book, but not enough. I started in on my reread of Anne Hébert’s classic Kamouraska (translated by Norman Shapiro), planning on getting just far enough into it to have things to write here . . . but I don’t want to put it down, despite being in the middle of other books that I’m enjoying (like one Chad mentioned last week, Laurence Leduc-Primeau’s , from QC Fiction and translated by Natalia Hero). I want to finish it because it’s gorgeous, it’s a bit frightening, and if you’re willing to let it, it’ll break your heart and punch you in the gut. If you let it. If you do the work.

If someone was asked to name the top five “important,” “classic,” and “literary” writers from Quebec, they’d go “What? From where?” But if you asked someone from Quebec, along with Ducharme, they’d almost certainly name Anne Hébert. is her most famous, and most widely available in English. What’s the pitch on this one besides just calling it classic? House of Anansi’s copy tells us it “is the timeless story of one woman’s destructive commitment to ideal love.” That does nothing for me. If anything, it turns me off. Timeless? Ideal love? Ehhhhh. A quote from Canadian Forum compares her to Proust, Joyce, Kafka, and Sarraute. Jesus. As a combination, it’s more meaningless than my Joyce/Salinger comparison for Ducharme last week. Oh, the other quote throws out Brontë. I actually like Brontë (Charlotte, I assume), but that’s not really a selling point anymore.

The first thing I tell people about the book is that the voice switches between third and first person, where initially third is dominate, but the first takes over, more and more, though third never disappears completely. That’s interesting, right? It’s no gimmick, not a thing where the voice switches between sections, but intricate movement, changing mid-paragraph, the voice of a woman confronting her past, a woman judging herself and others, a woman who detaches from her multiple selves, because they exist for others, because others act on and create those names and identities, but somewhere beyond all that is an “I” that is for her, for her most sincere connections, and from there she can try and understand what she has done and what others too. Because this is a patient book, one where Hébert is masterfully in control of pacing, the clearest she states it comes well into the book, once you’ve already found your grounding:

It’s not the unrelenting light. No, it’s this terrible stillness. This distance that ought to be comforting me, this sense of detachment. It’s worse than all the rest. Seeing yourself as someone else. Pretending to be objective. Not feeling that you and that young bride are one and the same.

More concretely: Kamouraska is based on a true story. In the early nineteenth century, Elisabeth d’Aulnières married Antoine Tassy, well-off, land-owning man, “squire” of Kamouraska. He’s awful to her. She falls in love with an American doctor and murders Tassy. Later, she remarries. Years later, many, many children later, that husband is dying, and it’s time for Elisabeth to turn towards her memories, confess her past to herself. The movements from pasts to the present and back can happen quickly, though as the novel goes on, the story of her life with Tassy becomes more and more linear, more consistently told. At first she is afraid to go there, to think of the horrors she lived through, and the horror she inflicted, not only murdering Tassy.

The memories burst through her present contemplation of death, triggered by little thoughts and little moments. There are multiple pasts, the time before her marriage, when her aunts molded her into a “proper lady” in Catholic Quebec, the early days of meeting her husband, the time after his death, and most persistently, the time of her trial for his murder. It’s the trial that most frequently forces its way to her consciousness, so much so that she speaks defenses of herself to a nameless judge, sometimes defenses of actions well after and not involving the murder.

At times the movements are hard to follow, much as third- and first-person perspective overlap, so do pasts and presents. The more she contemplates that life before, the more comfortable she becomes there, or maybe she’s not comfortable, but it becomes more and more difficult to escape, more necessary to reside in:

That time. That one time. A certain time of my life, moved back to, into like an empty shell. Enclosing me again. With the sharp little click of an oyster snapping shut. I’m forcing myself to live within this narrow space. I’m settling into the house on Rue Augusta. I’m breathing its rarefied air, an air I’ve already breathed before. I’m taking the steps I’ve already taken. There is no Madame Rolland. Not anymore. I’m Elisabeth d’Aulnières, the wife of Antoine Tassy. I’m pining away. Dying, dying. I’m waiting for someone to come and save me. I’m nineteen years old . . .

Spoiler: no one saves her. Why would someone save her? Sure, a lover comes along, but is she saved? Or is she just condemned to a different form of punishment? I don’t fully remember the end, but with a hundred pages to go on the reread, and given the state Elisabeth was in when I stopped to write this, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.

Kamouraska is a cruel book. That’s one of the things I admire about it. It’s also a compassionate book. It’s haunting. Elisabeth d’Aulnières married an awful man when she was a child. He cheats on her openly, he abuses her. He rapes her. And like a proper lady of the time, like a woman raised in religious Quebec, she’s meant to let him, because what’s marital rape, right? So she kills him. She doesn’t regret this, but she still lives with guilt. She feels for her younger, broken self. But she also feels for this man who was tormented, who was not only violent towards her, but towards himself. The doctor who she loves, he’s not an innocent either. There are no innocents, not the other women involved with her husband, not her husband, not herself. Maybe her new husband, but probably not, after all, she birthed him many children, and was that a choice? But every single person enacts cruelty. Every single person her narrative aggresses towards, and boy does it come at people, she also opens her heart to. Which itself causes her pain.

It’s a beautiful book. It’s a feminist book. It’s at times a difficult book, because of the prose, because of the emotions at stake. It’s accessible because of that heart, because in the end it wants to connect, Elisabeth wants to have her voice heard, needs to have it heard. It’s a Quebecois book. The deep religiosity of the region is inescapable for her. Read it for all of these reasons. It does things you haven’t seen before, I promise you, and how many books do that?

Now, the final factor in why I picked this book? Because it touches on my home, on Vermont. That I’m so close to Quebec is only one of the reasons I’ve tried to read so much from the province. When the books cross into my land, it touches me a little.

Find my love, at the end of the earth. In Burlington. Burlington. The United States.

P.S. I’ve got two others for you. First: another book where I think the perspective of the voice is more of a reason to read than any plot description: Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s , translated by Rhonda Mullins. A finalist for last year’s BTBA (Peter McCambridge wrote the Why This Book Should Win post), this book is about a relationship between a woman and her grandmother . . . but it’s written in second person, to the grandmother, about her life. It does wonderful things with that. It’s also another portrayal of just how intensely Catholicism ran Quebec life, until rather recently. Second: Marie-Claire Blais’s , translated by arguably the GOAT translator of Quebec lit: Sheila Fischman. I force it in here because like the jacket copy of Kamouraska compares it to Brontë “but modern in style and explicitness,” except way, way, more accurately, let’s say that These Festive Nights is Woolf, but modern in style and explicitness.

A few weeks ago, Chad asked me for four books to read for his month of Quebec literature. I over-thought it, as I do. Do I go with ones I love most? Older books or recent releases? Do I make sure to have a variety of publishers, of both the original French and the translation? Am I balancing the gender of the author and the translators? Am I using these rhetorical questions as a delaying tactic to begin actually writing? Yes. They were real questions though, and in the end I threw them all out by coming up with a simple structure: three books that are classics in Quebec but which are criminally unknown in the U.S. (and ignored in English Canada, but I’m not here to go on about the Two Solitudes), plus the thing I’d read most recently. I gave the list to Chad, he seemed happy . . . then weeks later he came back to me saying he’s got too much to read and can I write about them myself. So, here I am, continuing this pretense that I’m some half-expert on Quebecois literature, despite having no French, but hey, I live near Quebec and sometimes I go there and sit at a dinner table with friends patiently waiting for the next time they switch to English for my benefit.

Let’s start with a book by the god of Quebec lit, Réjean Ducharme. He’s hard to come by in English now, with books not yet translated, books out of print, books in need of a new translation, but Talonbooks has two translations by Will Browning, and . Of the two, I probably prefer Go Figure. The dumbest thing I could say about Ducharme, and so the thing that would probably help sell some books, is that he’s like the French-Canadian cross of James Joyce and J. D. Salinger. It’s hyperbolic nonsense that in the end doesn’t really hold, like most comparisons of the kind, but also like those comparisons, there’s truth in it. Ducharme was a genius with wordplay, with puns, with language slipping all over the place, not quite meaning what you’d think, not quite holding but always moving forward towards something new. The narrator of Go Figure, Rémi, is halfway brilliantly in control of his language, and halfway someone just barely following the madness of their distractions and obsessions.

The easy, obvious part of the Salinger comparison is that Ducharme eschewed celebrity, was a “recluse,” and had stopped publishing fiction well before his death in August of 2017. But it cuts deeper than that. Children, the wildness of children, features prominently in both Go Figure and Miss Take. There is something like innocence in their behavior, but not in a way that suggests purity or goodness. Instead it is fierce, untamed pursuit of life that society does not approve of, a clash that leads to pain, torment. There is no idealization of the children not yet tamed by the world, but Ducharme is indeed on their side. As Rémi says of his child friend at one point: “With that, she left, completely disgusted by a preaching moralizer who was despoiling her.”

Have I preambled enough? Should I actually write about Go Figure now? Before I start my look into Go Figure, if you prefer someone who knows much more than I do, look to Dimitri Nasrallah’s article in .

I’m trying to follow in Chad’s style a little here. This isn’t a review, it’s scattered thoughts about a book I haven’t finish rereading, and I’m probably going to start drinking at some point while writing this. Or maybe while editing, whichever. It’s all okay though, so long as I convince a couple of you to get this book. Or convince enough of you to clamor for Ducharme so much that some publisher gets him back in print, gets new translations out in the world. Okay, done hesitating.

Go Figure has a plot: a young couple, Rémi and Mammy, are utterly broken by the miscarriage of twin daughters. Isolated from each other, Mammy goes to travel Europe with a beautiful seductress while Rémi renovates a mess of a home in rural Quebec. There’s a community around him, many women, some men, and of course, a child. Fannie is Rémi’s closest companion, a replacement for his dead daughters and for his wife. Rémi narrates his relationships with his new friends, their parties together, their struggles and their pleasures. He is isolated, deeply, deeply alone, but also already intimately connected with the people in the village, because that is life, right? Isolation and connection both utterly inescapable. He details the work he’s doing on his house, his successes and failures as a guy from Montreal trying to make it in the country. (Of the local hardware dealer: “he has a knack for deflating the swelled-headed fugitives from Montreal.”) But most of all, he speaks to Mammy and to her companion. He longs for them. He doesn’t know how to be live with out without them, or with their adventure abroad, but he will.

So that’s the plot. But good luck finding it. Rémi isn’t narrating for the reader, he’s speaking to and for himself, chasing his language and his thoughts and god knows where they’ll take him at any moment. Go Figure is, yes, a difficult book. Straightforward things get caught up in the language, in the twists of Rémi’s mind so that you lose track of what is happening, who he’s on about at the moment, who is doing what, and you only have the twisting path of language to follow. Rémi himself knows this: “I don’t know what I’m saying anymore. I’ve lost the thread. Even the fabric of speech no longer holds water, no longer sustains us.”

And yet . . . this isn’t all language game, isn’t a fall towards nonsense: it’s the way this hurt man’s mind functions, how it expresses his life. Ducharme is a master of style, but his writing is deeply, deeply emotional, his characters are complex humans trying to make it in a world that doesn’t root for anyone: “As cannibals go, we are quite peculiar: we only eat the ones we love and only their very best, and when we’re done, we dab our lips with a handkerchief.”

Go Figure is funny, too. In all sorts of ways. Sometimes it’s silly, quick: “a caper designed to lead Fannie into temptation, but deliver her from ladders.” The jokes are compulsive, and a challenge to translate (some of them I have no idea how Browning did it, would love to know how creative he got), barely holding to sense: “I didn’t wait to be asked twice, I perched her on my shoulders, and I have no idea what impression she gave me yet again—whether I was happy to have her, or unpappy she wasn’t mine.” Unhappy, unpappy, it’s silly, it’s funny, but goddamn if it isn’t heartbreaking too, coming from this man who lost two daughters. Are these slips even under Rémi’s control? “I’ve metaphorically put all our eggs in one casket.”

For me, beyond the insane intelligence of this book and of Browning’s translation, beyond the raw beating heart, the almost miraculous stretches of compassion towards each and every character, beyond the joy in the possibilities of language, what I love most is that it’s filthy as fuck. Rémi is obsessed with the sexual. The sexual is inescapable, it’s in every character, including the children (child are wild beings, remember?). Sex is everywhere, in conversations, in touches, in Rémi’s thoughts, in other’s thoughts, in movement, and of course, in language. I live for filthy lines, for filthy jokes, so here: “What’s the use of all that, apart from tiptoeing through the twolips.”

It’s a line of dialogue thrown out between Rémi and one of the locals, a woman. The whole passage is a perfect example of how this book goes. It’s part description of them working on the house, part weird exchange. I could quote the whole thing, but I’d rather end on a passage showing the beauty Ducharme is capable of. Most of the time, the book is a prayer towards Mammy, towards woman Rémi loves more than anything, obsesses over, but who is a distant as a loved one can be. That’s where most of the pain and beauty resides. (For it always comes back to you, you who are my law, who hold the mirror, from the side that is betrayed, from the other side of the gulf widened by every betrayal.) But the presence of Fannie, that child who is friend, source of joy, source of pain, stand in for lost children and lost wife, is a close second. Regarding Fannie:

She was sent to get me, and it’s urgent. She takes me by the hand. I let myself be led. How can you resist—her fingers are so slim, so delicate; it’s beyond human. We’re taken by grace and put back in our place, in the inferior realm to which we ascend while growing up. We’re nothing but organs and infections, she’s nothing but art. We moan and groan, she’s lost in reverie. We have eateries, sculleries, histories, breweries, Tuileries, therapies to treat ourselves, therapists to hold us hostage and demand higher ransom. She has nothing, she is all she has.��

So that’s Go Figure, the way I see it after reading it years ago and rereading the first seventy-five pages.

I don’t know folks. Read Ducharme. Read , then read . Look for them in used bookstores, buy them online, whatever. He’s a master. I want you to read him. Quebecers want you to. Norm fuckin’ Macdonald wants you to, seriously. I made those comparisons cause that’s what we do in this lit world . . . but the man stands alone. This isn’t just some of the best literature from a small province of Canada, but some of the best you can find anywhere.

PS: I want to end all of these with additional recommendations, connected somehow to the book I’m focused on. Two contemporary story collections, and , translated by Pablo Strauss and Donald Winkler, respectively, contain stories that call to mind Go Figure. They’re vastly different in most ways, but still, Archibald’s “House Bound” and Bock’s “The Worm” and “The Call” all contain the seed that is a man, a little broken, moving into a home, working on the home, with some fractured relationship with his wife. Ducharme is under-read, but he’s not forgotten.

Both and are available through the and if you use 2MONTH at checkout, you’ll get 20% off.

Feel free to comment on this episode—or on the book in general—either on this post, or at the official

Follow and for more thoughts and information about upcoming guests. Be sure and buy the Boston Review to read Jess’s story, and follow for various book thoughts and terrible sports takes.

And you can find all the Two Month Review posts by clicking here. And be sure to

The music for this season of Two Month Review is by Els Surfing Sirles.

The entry below is by P. T. Smith, a frequent Three Percent contributor who has also been a BTBA judge and has worked with The Scofield and Asymptote.

by Sergei Lebedev, translated from the Russian by Antonina W. Bouis (Russia, New Vessel Press)

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Making the Shortlist: 74%

Chad’s Uneducated and Unscientific Percentage Chance of Winning the BTBA: 16%

Judging from the cover copy and selected blurbs, the reason the Sergei Lebedev’s Oblivion, translated by Antonina W. Bouis, should win the 2017 BTBA is because it is an Important and Necessary novel: it “probe[s] the legacy of the Soviet prison camp system,” is “an important book above where Russia is today,” “discloses the weight of Soviet history,” and is “a haunting tale about the loss of national memory.” This is all true, sure, but would never be enough for me to pick up a novel, much less believe it deserves to win an award like the BTBA. More compelling is how it does these things, how the prose, structure, aesthetics, accomplish this. If a novel exists solely to be an important cultural, historical artifact, count me out.

So, Oblivion deserves to win because it’s a beautiful, creative, linguistically challenging novel interested in many things besides the history of Russia and its lasting influence. From his earliest pages, Lebedev sets the terms of his novel, not that it will be about Russia and history, but that essential to it all is language as something with a physical tangible presence in the world, about the land and the animals that inhabit it, and about the deeply, intimately personal. It is a gorgeous and mysterious, contextless, opening section:

Birches, snow, sky, road, fire, smoke, frost—I repeated the words that I remembered for only a slightly shorter time than I remembered myself. Birches, snow, firewood, sky, road, fire, smoke, frost—the words grew, as if they were material, had material energy; the words sounded symphonically, one through another, without blending, the frost was frosty, the fire fiery, the smoke smoky; the words became translucent, melting slightly, like pure flame, their phonetic casings lost their hardened precision, and the eye perceived the pure essence of meaning.

At any moment, the narrator may drift off, taking a minor observation and riffing in a widening gyre. When he witnesses an old woman “hilling potatoes in the garden,” he see a whole class of being: “These old women are a special breed—they don’t get tired, life to them is a daily chores—dig, water, hill, weed; they harness themselves habitually and probably only for themselves, without hope, without expectation, without haste.” You don’t need to agree with his insights, theories, explorations, don’t need to believe, or you can, but either way, they are beautiful, intelligent, and feed back on themselves, Lebedev’s way of giving personality to his unnamed narrator. Later, when of the same woman, he writes, “she had become something like a film strip or a gramophone recording that captured the image and the voice of the deceased; she did not embroider or invent things; she toiled as an eyewitness,” it’s a tacit admission that he is something other, not an eyewitness, not toiling. It’s this other role that allows the novel to work as it does.

One of these conceptual wanderings opens the space for the narrator to begin his recollections. Looking at his own life, the narrator meanders at length on the blindness of his elderly neighbor, known only as Grandfather II. It’s a meditation on blindness creating the consciousness of this man, and how it crafts the narrator’s perception of him, his memories of him. Grandfather II’s blindness is “why [he] did not persist in the viewer’s retina, he seeped through it, remaining a vague silhouette; you remember his profile better than his face, he somehow was always turned sideways, behind something, as if in a crowd.” As the narrator tells the story of his life with Grandfather II, making no distinction between his own memories and recollection of events before he was born, you understand that this man has some other history, and that when it is uncovered, that is when Russia’s history will be encountered. At first, the narrator seeks personal answers, to understand the role Grandfather II played in forming his childhood, and at the very moment that personal investigation becomes active, takes him to an old mining town, the space of the novel opens again, to the collective past, the narrator forced to look beyond himself, but never leaving that behind fully.

That Lebedev takes his time getting Oblivion to its destination elevates the book mightily. The novel’s structure is subtle, aligned with the moves of the narrator’s thoughts. The narrator is full of ideas, beliefs, declarations of faith and conceptual explorations, but none of it is Lebedev telling you anything, telling you the seriousness of his project, or even what that project will be. Lebedev does ask the reader to work, which is fitting for a book that should win the BTBA. The ask is rewarded as the narrator seeks answers without knowing his initial question, and uncovering more questions as he pursues answers; he’s fascinating as he stretches his language to accommodate his ideas; and throughout it all, there is the beauty in the prose and the depth of emotions found in the minor incidents that create the world of Oblivion.