French bestseller translated into English
Suzanne’s unusual heroine takes readers on a journey through history
Some novels — let’s be honest here — leave you thinking the author must have had a contract to fulfil. But, there are others that convince you this is the book the author was waiting all her life to write. Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s 2015 bestseller La femme qui fuit, now available in English as Suzanne (Coach House Books, 262 pp, $20.95, translated by Rhonda Mullins) is in that second group. But, as the 37-yearold writer and filmmaker recalls, it wasn’t quite like that.
“No, not at all,” said the mother of three in a café on St-Zotique St. near her Petite Patrie home. “Growing up, my grandmother never really interested me. All that I knew about her was that she had abandoned my mother.”
Understandably conflicted in her feelings and having little actual contact while her grandmother was alive, BarbeauLavalette found her curiosity piqued on discovery of a cache of photos, letters and documents in her grandmother’s Ottawa apartment after she died in 2009. Sensing a potential literary subject, she hired an investigator to help fill in the gaps. That done, it was a matter of a mere nine months to write the book.
When Barbeau-Lavalette casually mentions that this is the first English-media interview she will have done about the book, it’s a sign of just how surreal the French-English reading divide in Quebec and the rest of Canada can be. The novel was a bestseller in Quebec, generating a buzz that landed the author on Tout le monde en parle and the book on CEGEP course lists throughout the province. It has also done very well in France, and by the time all its translations roll in, it will be available in 12 different languages.
Speaking of translation, there were difficulties coming up with an English version of the title. The problem was that tricky word “fuit,” or “fuir” — roughly, “to flee.” The closest English equivalents proposed by translator Rhonda Mullins came across sounding, in Barbeau-Lavalette’s words, “too judgmental,” a crucial consideration given a heroine many readers have found impossible to sympathize with.
“Many readers, especially women of a certain age, have said they detest her,” BarbeauLavalette said. “But just as many have expressed a certain admiration for her.”
The settled-upon choice might, especially given the slight historical overlap, lead some casual observers to think the novel has something to do with the titular heroine of a famous song by a certain recently departed Montreal icon. It doesn’t, but this Suzanne is just as fascinating.
Raised in Ottawa’s working class in the depths of the Depression, the young Suzanne chafed against every possible role assigned to her, setting the pattern for a lifetime of commitment avoidance — a pattern that extended to her role in the lives of the two children she had with artist Marcel Barbeau. In Montreal, the young Suzanne, a budding poet and painter, quickly fell in with a group of rebel artists who soon became signatories to the seminal Refus Global manifesto, the first volley in what became the Quiet Revolution. But, she was not one to fall into a comfortable groove, embarking on a seemingly random odyssey that took her at various times to the Gaspé, Belgium, New York and even further afield.
Among the most impressive things about Suzanne (the book) is how effortlessly it covers such a broad sweep, both geographically and historically. Plenty of writers have fallen at that hurdle, but Barbeau-Lavalette, by creating and sustaining a flawless narrative voice — the novel is written in the second person, the granddaughter addressing her now-deceased grandmother — overrides any potential structural ungainliness.
Constructed of short sentences in short chapters, the book is among the most unconventional page-turners you’re likely to encounter. Any one of its many settings, you can’t help but reflect, could easily have made for novel in itself. A brief passage where Suzanne finds herself, Zelig-like, on a trip to Alabama with the Freedom Riders in Civil Rights-era America is especially vivid — and eerily contemporary at a time when the U.S. president is enabling the KKK.
“It may be true that some of those passages could have been longer,” Barbeau-Lavalette said. “But the whole point of Suzanne was that she fled. She never settled. I wanted the book to reflect that.”
We’ve become conditioned, in the books we read and the films we watch, to our heroines achieving some form of redemption, however problematic they might be and however spurious that redemption. But, as you might have guessed, Suzanne isn’t that kind of novel, and that’s because Suzanne wasn’t that kind of person.
“No, she wasn’t,” said BarbeauLavalette of the woman she says she still can’t love. “Life is seldom so simple.”