\u201cIn my memory, in my mind, this is what happened. It\u2019s my truth and that\u2019s the only one that counts . . . I\u2019ll let you be the judge. I\u2019ll judge you too, in due course.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What drives this book is the shocking, twisted, and ultimately hilarious worldview of its narrator. The story revolves around the protagonist\u2019s quest to find his suicidal mother, from whom he was taken at a young age by Social Services. He intends to reunite with her, and genuinely believes that this reunification will be life-altering and will somehow drastically improve his life. Hopping from foster home to foster home, the narrator develops a misplaced sense of empathy, a partial misunderstanding of social cues, and a firm belief in his own righteousness. He is terrifying, a delinquent, a stalker, constantly on amphetamines and on the verge of a violent breakout that keeps the reader on edge. At the start of the novel he logs into the email account of his girlfriend (of just three weeks) after she starts to become distant, only to grow jealous of old love messages she\u2019d written to an ex. He then decides to kidnap one of her cats and write her a letter:<\/p>\n
\u201cAs a postscript, I explained that I was taking her cats because she cared about them more than she cared about me, until she decided to put more effort in and not contact Gregory anymore.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I won\u2019t say what happens next, but it does not end well for the cat. Mixing with moments of sweetness, uncompromising shock, violence, and humor, the reader\u2019s own (hopefully) more healthy perception of reality becomes a character in and of itself, both enjoying and struggling with Goudreault\u2019s protagonist.<\/p>\n
The boldest aspect of Mamma\u2019s Boy<\/em> is the deep understanding of psychological normality and its absolute violation in the character construction of its protagonist, without ever falling into the realm of psychosis, the delusions of the protagonist allow him believe things for which he has no evidence. Unreliable as the narrator may be, awful and violent, his journey is one that absolutely captivates you and makes you want to turn the page. The pain of a young maladapted adult and the evidence of how social systems fail to notice or appropriately assist those that may need it most are issues indirectly central to the story. He believes himself to be extremely intelligent and handsome, handing out advice such as \u201cYou don\u2019t show up to visit someone empty-handed. You need flowers or a weapon, it\u2019s well documented,\u201d and doing things such as \u201cI drank too much, smoked too much, fucked Nicole again. I didn\u2019t even want to, but when it\u2019s there for the taking . . .\u201d<\/p>\nMamma<\/em>\u2019s Boy<\/em> is dark and twisted, but it is also incredibly amusing and raw. David Goudreault is a Quebecer writer who won the first World Cup of Slam Poetry and has received awards such as the Grand Prix litt\u00e9raire Archambault for this very novel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mamma’s Boy\u00a0by David Goudreault Translated from the French by JC Sutcliffe 192 pgs. | pb | 9781771663823 | $20.00 Book*hug Review by Rafael Sanchez Montes This incredibly fun novel is a first-person account and confession by the unnamed protagonist, who offers his side of the story to what he claims is the jury […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":408142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67456],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408132"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":408162,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408132\/revisions\/408162"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/408142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/10\/Mamas-Boy-David-Goudreault-Cover-Image.jpg\")
<\/p>\n