No stopping this book’s fierce voice
Giller finalist tells of when tall tales were one of few entertainments
Eric Dupont’s Songs for the Cold of Heart ( the Giller-shortlisted English translation of the Quebec bestseller La fiancée americain) begins with a father telling a story to his three children. It’s the winter of 1958 — the date is significant because television hasn’t yet arrived in the town of Rivière-du-Loup, which means listening to the tall tales of Louis “The Horse” Lamontagne are still the best way to pass the time.
Songs for the Cold of Heart is a novel built out of such stories, beginning with those told by Papa Louis, but then taking us much further afield. The narrative spreads through time and space; the act of storytelling (taking in all forms of gossip, rumour and fabulation) is likened to the flow of lava or the contagion of smallpox. There’s no stopping the fiercely readable voice of this book once it gets going, no holding its incestuous proliferation of stories down.
The stories are in turn so thick and grainy with seemingly random detail that an entire world seems to open up beyond each page. Then, the bounds of realism also dissolve as supernatural characters and events are introduced or invented. Just as the narrative spreads out from Rivière-du-Loup, so the particular and local events described take on a larger significance as the context for viewing them enlarges to take in whole swathes of the collective consciousness of the 20th century.
The usual label given to this sort of fiction is “magic realism,” and Dupont has been compared to the Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his employment of the technique. However, there have been a number of prominent Canadian novels whose family sagas are directed toward the same operatic intersection of legend and history. For some reason it’s a particularly popular mode among Newfoundland writers, with such books as Galore by Michael Crummey and The Son of a Certain Woman by Wayne Johnston coming to mind.
Such a large, complicated novel is a balancing act. Songs for the Cold of Heart is rambling and spontaneous but also coherent and carefully structured, rooted in the local but never sentimental or provincial in its outlook. Though some of the energy flags in the middle it’s a wonderful read, a testament to the continuing richness and vitality of the art of fiction.