National Post (National Edition)
The Longest Year is the kind of book you tell people about.
THE LONGEST YEAR HONOURS THE INTRICACIES OF OUR NATION’S LANGUAGES WITHIN A LAYERED, MOVING STORY
The Longest Year By Daniel Grenier, translated by Pablo Strauss House of Anansi 384 pp; $22.95
In 2015, Brossard-born author Daniel Grenier published his first novel, an acclaimed debut landing him a spot on the Governor General’s French-language fiction award shortlist. I heard then the thing was pretty spectacular, but couldn’t tell you for myself. Now, though, L’année la plus longue has become The Longest Year, a gracious gift to guilty Anglophones care of Quebec translator Pablo Strauss. So here I’ll confirm in good conscience that the thing — a magical thing, really — is, indeed, pretty spectacular.
The Longest Year is the kind of book you want to tell people about, and that might just be its biggest problem. A complex plot, though told stunningly without convolution within, makes word-ofmouth a challenge for the lit-fic-histo-fantasy-mountain-lovers it’s sure to charge up. Here’s my stab: a boy, Thomas, is born in Chattanooga, Tenn., by way of a French-Canadian father (Albert) and American mother (Laura), who’d been a little shotgun about their 1979 union. 1979 isn’t a good time to be black in Tennessee; it’s not so great for foreigners with funny accents, either; things get tricky if you happen to be a Liberal-leaning man of the latter marrying into an American family not so fond of the former — with a penchant for Confederate lawn flags to boot. Into this is born little Thomas Langlois.
Chattanooga’s Appalachians keep the region from getting Alabama-hot, but things do tend to heat up between locals in its summer swell. Citizenship-straddling son Thomas takes things in at a calendric crawl, aging by just one year for every four in the Gregorian world. Thomas Langlois was born on February 29th, 1980, and in The Longest Year, Daniel Grenier takes that date’s intercalary leap literally. Thomas’ skip-clipped means of maturing is addressed early by father Albert, some chronographic magic proven to be in good company — on Thomas’ first/fourth birthday, he receives a letter from a few Canadian horologists who’ve lived by that same slow clock for several decades. Their mysterious letter offers both welcome and warning for the life Thomas has entered: the boy will, after all, outlive everyone he loves.
Think on that for a second. Sure, give the idea a gold star for its lag on liver spots and bald patches, but try to ponder being without the few things that make it more than just breath: people, and a niggling sense of mortality that keeps you keeping on. Luckily, Thomas lands at least a little of that when an accident draws him into active history, an adventure across time and place that traces his family from first hoof through Quebec’s Appalachian range to America’s due South, one Civil War-era tragedy marking the mid-point between.
A first-person narrator ducks in intermittently, setting and re-setting the story’s context as its characters make their way to times, places and temperaments old and new. All we’s and our’s and rhetorical questions, the voice rings right for grandpa’s lap — it’s Mother Goose storytelling, a sweet ode to simpler times, but does grate a little over 380-odd pages, giving way to a tone cloying closer to condescension than charm.
Daniel Grenier wrote a spectacular story. I’ve retold and reviewed it in my best effort above, but that’s a thing I could do only because some language-loving masochist, a man named Pablo Strauss, translated the novel to English. If we can think on one more thing, then, let it be that: Strauss’s genius feat honouring the respective intricacies of our country’s languages within a layered, moving story told in time-warped fantasy. I’ve never seen the translator in person, but I can imagine a face that tells a bit of time itself, Strauss perhaps aging four years for every one book done like this. The man has masterfully translated L’année la plus longue, Grenier’s genre-volt-face, into The Longest Year — a year so good I wouldn’t mind living it a few times over myself, this novel’s plot begging for another crack.
I read a lot of the book sitting a few feet away from my 79.5-year-old grandmother, an Italian-born immigrant with great skin, big glasses and one ceramic hip. Ida Arnone came to Canada 63 years ago and has since cradled four sons and buried one husband. His was the first funeral she attended in this country (far too soon), but these days Nonna averages half-a-dozen friend-of-a-friend services each month.
Hers is a mind in translation — a masterful, one, really, given its exclusively informal English education and age — and minds of this nature have conspicuous tells, irritating if not so beloved: slack jaw, brewing thought, words in chamber that can’t yet come — stuck in their mind’s first language, another time and place and person entirely.
A great deal of The Longest Year is written at that intersection of linguistic uncertainty. It’s a book about a family confined and defined by their respective languages, each character’s dialogue penned deftly in the unmistakable cadence of first-to-second language speech. The book moves fluidly across century; a story about time that occupies and transcends temporal passage within. Here, now, it’s been translated en masse. I’m not sure what the French word for that endeavour might be, but English has a good one: doozy.
Though I can only assume this was a very difficult novel to write, I can verify it would be downright painful to try and translate. Reading The Longest Year, I heard in real-time echo all that confronts a person’s ability to form and churn and flip phrases from one dialect to another. God help the man — here, Pablo Strauss — who’s doing it with Grenier’s magnum opus of intricacy, two minds working doubletime to understand a complex but expertly drawn story, together attempting to render it accurately and with elegance on the page.
I read the product of two great minds sitting a few feet away from another one myself. But I realized in relating praise for The Longest Year — slow, hyper-enunciated musings to my grandmother, and here now as something more polished to you — that the act of transmitting those words is itself an entirely appropriate celebration of this book’s linguistic defiance. Grenier’s French and Strauss’s English, my Toronto patois and Nonna’s dialectic Italian, all coming round and back again in some jaunty West Germanic powwow.
I’ve got only bad English to write about a very good book, but there’s trust in knowing so many skilled minds have already had their way with its story, that enough to deserve attention and Grenier and Strauss laurels alongside.