Life in the Court of Matane
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Nadia Comaneci's gold-medal performance at the Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976 is the starting point for a whole new generation. Eric Dupont watches the performance on TV, mesmerized. The son of a police officer (Henry VIII) and a professional cook—as he likes to remind us—he grows up in the depths of the Quebec countryside with a new address for almost every birthday and little but memories of his mother to hang on to. His parents have divorced, and the novel's narrator relates his childhood, comparing it to a family gymnastics performance worthy of Nadia herself. Life in the Court of Matane is unforgiving and we explore different facets of it (dreams of sovereignty, schoolyard bullying, imagined missions to Russia, poems by Baudelaire), each based around an encounter with a different animal, until the narrator befriends a great horned owl, summons up the courage to let go of the upper bar forever, and makes his glorious escape.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This novel from Dupont (La Logeuse), the first from a new fiction imprint dedicated to publishing "the very best of a new generation of Quebec storytellers in flawless English translation," lives up to that ambition. It tells the story of Eric, a boy growing up in small-town Quebec in the 1970s and '80s. His father, whom he calls Henry VIII, divorces Eric's mother, dubbed Catherine of Aragon, and takes Eric and his sister away with his new wife, Anne Boleyn, who is in turn replaced by Jane Seymour. The children must abide by Henry VIII's edicts, the principle one of which is to forget their mother. By turns poignant, playful, and nostalgic, the book evokes '70s Quebec with the quirky but successful device of combining an autobiographical family story with motifs drawn from fable, history, politics and myth. Despite the relaxed social mores brought about by Quebec's Quiet Revolution, these baby boomers and their children still have much to struggle against in their society, a struggle exacerbated by their uneasy relationships with one another. Translator McCambridge beautifully captures the joyous top notes and the darker undercurrents of this fascinating voice.
