Leroux turns Curiosity into tribute
Catherine Leroux channels her curiosity into powerful tribute to forgotten women
It’s enough to make a person believe in fate.
In 2001, the unidentified skeletal remains of a woman were found in a wooded incline behind the old Royal Victoria Hospital, on the south-facing slope of Mount Royal. Estimated to have died two years earlier, she came to be referred to as Madame Victoria, and what was left was filed away in a police evidence box.
Several years later, Catherine Leroux was at home in front of her TV, “very pregnant,” when a story on ICI Radio-Canada’s Enquête grabbed her attention.
“It wasn’t about the discovery of (Madame Victoria’s) body,” recalled the 39-year-old Montreal writer. “It was about everything that was being done to try and identify her. A lot was done. They created a composite image of her face, a 3D bust, they analyzed her hair. There was nothing they didn’t try.
“My intuition, and also what I gathered from talking to the journalists who covered the story, is that everybody had an attachment to this story, because it’s so strange, so sad. It seemed impossible that she would just remain so anonymous. A lot of people responded and thought that maybe they knew who she could have been. But none of those leads led to an answer.”
As it happened, Leroux — inspired by her own upbringing in “a family of women, a very feminine family” — had already been conceiving of a book featuring a series of portraits of women. When she saw that program, it all fell into place: she would take this anonymous life and write 12 versions, told in a variety of styles and genres, of how a woman could have met such an end.
Madame Victoria (Biblioasis, 206 pages, $19.95, translated by Lazer Lederhendler) is the result.
“I wanted to experiment, try genres that I wouldn’t necessarily be game to write a whole novel in,” Leroux said of her stylistic strategy. “It was fun. I used things like science fiction and fantasy, for example, because I didn’t want (the book) to be realistic theories as to exactly who she might have been. The first one or two maybe are, but the reason we’re touched by her story is that it could almost be anyone, at any time in history.”
“Fun” is a word that comes up often when Leroux is talking about her work and its process, but there’s nothing frivolous implied in how she uses it. Instead, it’s the kind of fun that comes with full creative engagement, with choosing seldom-trod paths and arriving in places you might not have thought you’d reach.
Her second novel, The Party Wall (her first to be translated into English, in what has become a fruitful ongoing professional connection with Lederhendler), was a bestseller in French, and was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Madame Victoria deserves the same level of acclaim, and confirms the 39-year-old Montrealer as one of Canada’s best and most adventurous writers.
For her subjects in Madame Victoria, Leroux chose women whose lives and stories are under-told, even ignored altogether, in our culture and society.
“That was my intention,” she confirmed. “But it also came with the territory. How else do you explain that a woman died in one of the biggest cities in Canada and we haven’t been able to find out who she was for all this time? There was no agenda, but the writing of the book brought up all this stuff — how women were, and are, erased, in so many ways. Their voices are erased, their bodies are erased, they’re made invisible.”
For all the varied routes these women take, the reader knows they are going to end up where their real-life counterpart did: on that wooded slope, at the end of a sequence of events that can only have been awful. It’s a narrative constraint that provides Madame Victoria with a very effective structural through line. For a parallel, Leroux cited a TV show she used to watch in reruns, dubbed into French, when she was growing up in Quebec City.
“It’s like Columbo,” she said, recalling the 1970s series with Peter Falk as the rumpled, oneeyed
detective. “You know how it’s going to end, but you don’t know how they’re going to get there.”
Another affinity, perhaps a little less counterintuitive, is provided by the book’s epigraph, from a traditional American gospel song popularized by Johnny Cash: “There ain’t no grave/can hold my body down.”
“I had something different at first, but I found that it intellectualized the story too much,” said Leroux.
“This one is simple, but it contains so much. It said everything — on the literal level, but maybe there was also something about her essence that meant she couldn’t be buried, that her body couldn’t be contained anywhere. It also talked about what I was doing, which was resuscitating her.”
When writers shift their focus, moving on to new projects that claim their creative energy, their older books often undergo an eclipse, like old friends who may be regarded fondly but are almost never seen anymore. With Leroux and Madame Victoria, though, you sense a different, more permanent kind of relationship, partly down to the life the book has been finding in the world.
“A year ago I went to a CEGEP to do a talk about Madame Victoria, and all the students in the class had done their own versions of Victoria,” she recalled. “There were so many wonderful ideas.”
For her own part, Leroux can’t quite let go.
“I do Google (the story) every once in a while,” she said. “And of course everybody who knows me will send me anything that’s remotely connected to it. But I haven’t heard anything new. It will soon be 20 years since she died, so it seems less and less likely. And given that she was probably in her late ‘50s, the people that knew her are getting older and older. I’m still hoping, but …”
And there the thought trailed away. Leroux should be reassured, though — Madame Victoria the unknown woman won’t be forgotten, because Madame Victoria the book will be sticking around.
A lot was done. (to identify her). They created a composite image of her face, a 3D bust, they analyzed her hair. There was nothing they didn’t try.
What’s sure to be a highlight of the local comics-culture year is happening Thursday at 7 p.m. A double bill of graphic-lit luminaries sees Julie Doucet and Jason Lutes together at La Petite Librairie Drawn & Quarterly, 176 Bernard St. W. Chris Oliveros will be introducing the authors, both of whom have major books newly published. Lutes’s epic, kaleidoscopic historical novel Berlin, decades in the making, is already being hailed as an all-time classic, while Doucet’s Dirty Plotte: The Complete Julie Doucet is a mammoth gathering of work by Montreal’s pioneer of autobiographical underground comics. For more details, see bit. ly/2RZQsFh.