Memoria

"Did you love it? Isn’t it gorgeous? I kind of snuck it in. I set myself, as a limit, the last 20 years of Quebec literature and what I could choose that presented different currents and different voices. The translation of this one came out in 1999, although the novel itself is from before then. I’ve known Louise personally since my grad student days and this was her first novel. “Do we ever understand abandonment?” When I read it, it blew me away. It just describes a woman’s experience of being abandoned and trying to rebuild her life after that abandonment, in the most sensitive, kind and yet starkly painful terms. There’s some magic that she’s able to create in the way she turns small details into really big deals. So, this story that starts out as a story of loss and trying to recover from that becomes something so much more. She starts out with the question, ‘Do we ever understand abandonment?’ And she ends up, through the way her main character, Emma, meeting an older woman, being taught an important lesson about hanging onto the past and about things we can’t do anything about and that we can’t ever really comprehend. I wanted to try and find that that part where she’s talking with Madame Girard. Yes, exactly. She says, ‘You have to accept even if you don’t understand.’ The novel is about her learning to accept even though she doesn’t understand. There are a lot places in the narrative of this novel—which is relatively conventional, especially when you compare it to some of the others—where you think, ‘Oh my goodness, how is she going to deal with this?’ And yet she ends up in a place where she’s able to accept something that very few people could accept—which is to adopt your dead sister’s child. That child has been brought up in another country and in other language—because the sister fled to another country—and yet she has the generosity and openness of spirit not only to get there, but to welcome it, to undo the abandonment by an acceptance of the other. It’s sentimental, but not in a syrupy way at all—in a beautiful, literary way. There’s so many passages that I just adore in this book. For example, at the end of chapter 15, there is the passage where she writes: Avec le temps, il y a des douleurs qui s’apaisent, des ruines qui peuvent accueillir la lumière, des histoires qui n’ont pas le même dénouement. Ce n’est pas de l’oubli pourtant, une tache jaune balaie la fenêtre, mais on ne voit pas venir l’automne comme auparavant. Or in English: Some grief will ease as time goes by, some ruins can receive light, some stories have an unexpected ending. It isn’t as though we forget, a patch of yellow still sweeps across the window but we don’t see the coming of autumn as we used to. It’s so breathtakingly beautiful. It’s about learning to see differently, and I actually think that that’s the magic of Quebec literature for me and for my students: when they read these books they learn to see differently. Because I see echoes of my own experience transformed through the eyes of another, transformed through another language. Transformed through another cultural experience with which I nonetheless have affinities, and in which I am nonetheless grounded. The magic is that my students can feel that too, even though they don’t have the baggage that I do. “It shakes them out of their self-centeredness, their solipsistic idea of what being a North American is. And it also reminds them of the beauty and humanity which transcends all of our differences” I’ve been reading Quebec literature since the 1980s. I can tell when I’ve found a voice that I resonate with, when something is really beautiful or when it’s just trash. They obviously are getting the benefit of my experience, because I’m choosing for them what I want them to read. But these voices are able to draw them in. They’re just different enough. It’s like taking one step to the left—and all of a sudden your perspective gets changed. They see their own reality both reflected and refracted by these other pairs of eyes who live in the same North American space, who have similar cultural baggage, but not exactly the same, and hold up a mirror to the American experience that is just not quite exactly what they’re expecting. In many instances, it shakes them out of their self-centeredness, their solipsistic idea of what being a North American is. And it also reminds them of the beauty and humanity which transcends all of our differences. In most of the books that I’ve talked to you about there is always a reaching for beauty, even in the most horrific circumstances. Even in a war zone, with the The Orange Grove , there are passages of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary love. And that’s something we can all relate to."