Éric Chacour’s manuscript was so complete that at Alto, we once believed that an author from the house wanted to put the editorial process to the test. A dazzling story of a love which will force a doctor who until then had bowed to his destiny to leave his native Egypt. What I know about you is overwhelming thanks to this language which knows how to translate with the elegance of a goldsmith these moments when the life unpacks all its colors. But if this first novel is so striking, it’s because there’s nothing more moving than seeing someone finally become themselves, no matter the consequences.
“The only language spoken in this work is that of the heart,” wrote columnist Rima Elkouri about Dimitri Nasrallah’s fourth novel, translated by Daniel Grenier. The Montrealer of Lebanese origin offers one of his most endearing mother characters to a Quebec literature which was already populated with them: Muna, a French teacher who had every reason to believe that she could flourish in her native Quebec. ‘adoption. A book that would only be sad, because 1986 looks a little too much like 2023, if the son did not inject all his affection for his own mother.
Is memory, in reality, just another form of fiction? Rafaële Germain explored this vast question in Un Present Infinite (2016), and explores it again in this story of three memories, a generous and makeup-free portrait of his mother, the late and flamboyant press secretary Francine Chaloult, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. The former queen of chick lit also reveals a lot about herself, and continues one of the most astonishing reinventions of Quebec literature of the last 20 years. A writer with economical poetry, she knows how to enshrine an entire world of intimate devastation in formulas of merciless grace.
The truism has rarely been more true this year than between the pages of Mise en Format: there is nothing more universal than the intimate. By examining her own obsessive fitness practice, Mikella Nicol places in the dock a society that, very early on, taught her, through popular culture or through the voices of those close to her, that a woman should not only to be in control of her body, but that she wasn’t safe anywhere. She thus lets herself be guided by her disturbing intuition that “violence and beauty define femininity in equal measure”, without the reality around her going out of its way to contradict her.
Mathieu takes his dreams for reality, and that’s good, because reality can be very, very dull, when you have just finished high school and you have to show up every evening at a gas station in suburb. Critical of the absurdity of the world of work, a charnel house of hopes to which adults obey with too little resistance, this coming-of-age novel highlights with great humor the arrogance of a weakling who believes himself to be extraordinary, while recalling that adolescents, if they lack perspective, look at the renunciations and compromises of their elders with a view of undeniable insight.
In the last chapter of this collection of short stories, Marie Hélène Poitras describes the dizzying power of her passion for literature and for horses, by erecting a monument to an animal that has galloped into another dimension. It thus illuminates all of his work, rooted in a melancholy of loss. Loss of candor. Loss of a loved one. Loss of a place where, for an eternity or the time of a perfect song, it will have been sweet to be alive. More than 20 years after her first book, the writer is more than ever this master of powerful atmospheres, a virtuoso who measures each of her effects.
After the fireworks (the backfire?) of excess and toilet scenes of A Cigar on the Edge of the Lips, Akim Gagnon embraces his tender side in this prequel to his first novel. Portrait of an adolescence torn between his father’s bouts of euphoria and the gray cloud that still haunted the family home in ruins, Granby with a simple past pays homage, with irresistible self-deprecation, to the oxygen that cinema will become for a sensitive boy who would otherwise have been faced with a blocked horizon. The most disarming of odes to the father, precisely because the son does not mask his faults at all.
“Now I’m going to speak, and one day I’m going to die but, in the meantime, I’m not going to keep my bitch mouth shut,” announces Sacha – and she’s not lying – in the prologue to The version that doesn’t interest anyone, a novel of misadventures and disillusionment, which sets its scene in a Yukon where even the marginalized will turn out to be as stupid as the others. For more than 350 pages, Emmanuelle Pierrot maintains a punch worthy of a compact hardcore punk song. Books carrying such enthusiastic rumors rarely live up to the hype.
In this age where it is more important to publicly display one’s virtue than to actually work to transform the world, and where you will be rewarded for saying the right thing, even if you did the wrong thing, Catherine Lemieux offers a murderous satire of university microcosm. A twisted fable unfolding around a conference held by the Laboratoire du Néo-Moi Féminisant, this novel, whose opaquely dark humor is perhaps only an acute form of lucidity, chops up a medium where self-presentation triumphs over all. The funniest, or most tragic, book of the year, depending on your point of view.
Faced with the relentless announcement of his father’s diagnosis, who died 14 months later from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Simon Brousseau had to put fiction aside. In striking language, stripped of all artifice, because all ornament seems vain in the face of death, a son, himself a parent, wonders what good it can be to exist, when we know that everything will eventually change. on the side of suffering and mourning. He finds comfort in the wisdom of the Stoics, in the smile of his daughter and in his fond memories of the time spent with the man of his life.
