The Orange Grove

"For example, Larry Tremblay’s L’Orangeraie (translated as The Orange Grove ), is a novel which is an extraordinarily limpid fable, almost, of twin brothers who are caught up in war, and who, in a tragically Greek or Shakespearean manner, end up substituting one for the other: one must die and one survives. So you get that tragic element, but the novel is not constructed in a simple way, because by the end you discover that the events are transformed into a play. There’s a breaking of the boundaries between theatre and the novel. Larry Tremblay does that because he himself is a dramatist: his principal writing is for the theatre and he’s an actor. He’s also an adept of kathakali , which is an Indian dance style. He has a great sensitivity to crossing cultural boundaries that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. This novel is a story set in the war-torn Middle East, where you’ve got to take sides. You can’t remain neutral. Yet he’s born and raised in Quebec. I don’t think he’s ever lived in the Middle East, although he may have visited. But because of the global imaginary that Quebec literature now has, there are no boundaries to the topics that the writers can tackle if they feel called to do so. Really, it’s about the human experience and the fact that they can transcend the local and reach that level of universal. I think that speaks to another characteristic of Quebec literature: to be open to the world, to be hospitable at a very fundamental level and open to the other. I see both things going on: historically, a very strong sense of being anchored, but also a very open sense of adventure and a willingness to cross boundaries. Monique LaRue, who is a novelist herself, wrote an essay called “L’Arpenteur et le navigateur”, where she postulated that there are these two competing characteristics of the Quebec soul. One is the stay-at-home surveyor, measuring his terrain, cultivating his land, and is rooted; the other is this adventurer who goes out and charts the unknown. It can be. As are many other places, I’m sorry to say. It’s not an exception in that particular contemporary political tendency. It’s an amazing novel. It’s still on the bestseller list in Quebec several years after it came out."