Translations pack a punch in brevity
Newly translated novels illustrate the strengths to be found in brevity
It’s a cultural quirk that can go unnoticed unless you spend a lot of time hanging around in bilingual bookstores, or have one of those strange jobs whereby people send you books through the mail. I refer to the phenomenon of French readers, in Quebec no less than in France, being far more open to buying and reading short books of fiction than are their anglophone counterparts.
The francophone predilection is observable no less on the bestseller lists than at award-giving time, while in the English-reading world, a size bias lingers. An interesting test case happened in 2012, when the two most hotly tipped contenders for the Man Booker Prize were Colm Toibin’s 112page The Testament of Mary and Eleanor Catton’s 848-page The Luminaries. Catton’s book won, and while not wishing to cast any aspersions — the book is, by any sensible measure, magnificent — it’s hard not to suspect it had a built-in advantage.
The preamble, ironically a tad overlong, is by way of saying that two of the year’s best — and slimmest —translations of Quebec writers into English have just appeared, and it would be a shame if they were overlooked because of some unwritten criteria that measures worth by the page.
Martine Delvaux was profiled
in this space a little more than a year ago for Bitter Rose, a coming-of-age novel set in a stifling Franco- Ontarian town. Now, also translated by David Homel, comes The Last Bullet Is For You (Linda Leith Publishing, 125 pp, $14.95), in which a woman who might be the Bitter Rose girl grown up finds herself in the shell-shocked aftermath of a volatile relationship and addresses the man she thought she had loved.
The clear spiritual antecedent here is Elizabeth Smart’s epochal (and similarly short) 1945 novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, but there’s nothing retro or reverential about what Delvaux is doing. Her point-bypoint takedown of a Czech roué who considers himself superior to “Americans” (distinctions between Quebec, the rest of Canada and the United States are meaningless in this context) simply because he comes from an older culture, is withering and bracing in all the best ways.
But while plenty of cleansing anger is on display, the book is not a self-righteous screed. The narrator doesn’t spare herself: what, after all, was she doing with this person in the first place? “What was the empty room, what was the need you gave the impression you could fulfill, what truth about me did your presence reveal?” she asks, and finds no easy answers.
As with Smart, you end up grateful for the brevity, not because you don’t want more, but because you sense more might just be too much to take. This is intensity at a pitch best kept condensed.
In Maxime Raymond Bock’s Baloney (Coach House Books, 84 pp, $18.95, translated by Pablo Strauss) a young poet, beginning to doubt his vocation as he slips into the responsibilities of wage-earning and parenthood, encounters an older man on the fringes of the east-end open-mic café scene. Robert “Baloney” Lacerte is near the end of a varied and sometimes harrowing life: growing up postwar in an impoverished Laurentian community, getting lost in the detritus of the ’60s counterculture as a young man in Sherbrooke, going off on a mad Latin American excursion that ends very badly, finally coming back to eke out a menial Montreal existence, all the while driven to write voluminously.
Then again, maybe not: as the younger man points out, Robert (the origins of his nickname are forgotten even by himself ) “spun a good yarn, had a gift for making things up, or maybe a tendency to stray from the truth.” Now, as far as anyone can tell, he was simply “living out his reputation as a has-been, coasting on a career he’d never had.”
If you’re looking for a comparison point you might try Joseph Mitchell’s famous 1964 New Yorker story Joe Gould’s Secret, also involving a prickly semi-indigent with a way of making people think he might be a genius. Like the Delvaux-Smart parallel, though, this one shouldn’t be overplayed. Bock is really stepping into a much older tradition. You can picture versions of Robert and his conflicted follower (“My attraction was nothing more than selfish, morbid curiosity,” he says, but we don’t really believe him) in the pages of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, George Gissing ’s New Grub Street, even Flaubert’s A Sentimental Education.
To this lineage, Bock brings something very much his own, and very much Quebec: Baloney is a touching character study, but it could also be read, if you’re so inclined, as a parable for what became of a certain kind of cultural idealism. Bock hits a note that balances gentle mockery with genuine affection, and laces it all with a perfectly sustained comic melancholy. Then he steps aside, and leaves the reverberations to do their work.
Yes, you’ll read Baloney quickly. But you’re highly unlikely to read it only once.