L’Habitude des bêtes est un roman superbe, court et simple, qui s’attache à mettre en récit l’impermanence–la qualité éphémère de toute chose–à travers les yeux d’un jeune retraité nommé Benoît. Narrée à la première personne, l’histoire vous enveloppe dans l’intimité…
CanLit
This Week in CanLit is a new feature I’m experimenting with on MapleBooks. I’m reading so much about books that I figured I could write a weekly sum-up for people who have a better social life than I do! 1….
Il y a tout un pan sublime de la littérature canadienne-française dont les histoires se situent dans des communautés très reculées, voire oubliées, et dont le style magnifique et poétique de l’écriture contraste violemment avec les tragédies qu’elles narrent. Il…
In France, where I grew up, Little Sister would be at home in my favourite genre: le fantastique. As Wikipedia describes it: “What is distinctive about the fantastique is the intrusion of supernatural phenomena into an otherwise realist narrative.” Fantastique…
Poetry. Rhymes, verses, literary devices, cryptic meaning, my school-year headaches. When I was a student, I figured poems were pretentious pieces of literature meant to be deciphered, mainly to produce a decent essay. To me, poetry were mostly obscure and…
We are in 1968. A small coastal village of Labrador sees the birth of a baby with ambiguous sexual traits. At the hospital, it’s a mere ruler who decides upon the infant’s fate: “Penis size at birth is the primary…
Did you love Animal Farm by George Orwell? Then Fifteen Dogs is for you. This new novel by André Alexis, shortlisted for the Giller Prize 2015, features a group of pet dogs who are suddenly given human intelligence. Greek gods…
There’s nothing as terrifying as being told your newborn “will be sick a good deal and require special medical and nursing care, which cannot be given at home.” This is what Margaret Harrington from The Unfinished Child was told after…
Daydreams of Angels is a little piece of magic. It brought me back to the same feelings I had in my childhood while reading Alice in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz. These books immersed me in a world of wonders,…