Quebec - Reading List

I was spoilt for choice when it came to reading materials about Quebec and I still feel as though I only scratched the surface in terms of what I actually managed to read.

Here is my list:

Lonely Planet Canada (12th edition - 2014)

I try to read different kinds of guide books when I'm researching for this blog but I must admit, when I'm looking for practical information (bus times, how to get from A to B), it's hard to beat the Lonely Planet series. Of course, this time I was buying it for the very practical reason that I was travelling to Quebec, so I got the latest version. 

The Lonely Planet series is quite good at giving you a simple overview of the history and culture of a place and I also like the fact that they very clearly signpost you towards books, movies and music that will bring your journey (whether real or virtual) to life

Canada - Culture Smart! (2008) Diane Lemieux

My Quebecois reading list

Reading online reviews of the Culture Smart! series, I can see that some people really don't like these books and find them over-simplistic. I really enjoy them however and, as I have limited time for my research, I find these books to be a very easy way of getting an overview of a country. I also find them good to read on the road and I now not only buy this for blog research, but I also use them when I'm actually travelling, for example, on my recent trips to Morocco and Georgia. 

The Culture Smart! guide to Canada really help give me a simple overview of the entire country, before I delved into the more specific culture of Quebec. Canada is a place that really interests me and I was surprised to learn about the extent of regional feeling in Canada and how complicated and unusual it is to move from one Canadian province to another. I'd also never really thought about the fact that Canada is so big and I got a glimpse into the challenges that face a united Canada where Paris is just as accessible to Montreal as Vancouver! 

Sacré Blues: An unsentimental Journey through Quebec (2000) Taras Grescoe

This is the book that took up most of my time and although it took me absolutely ages to read this, I'd highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand more about Quebec, as it's so packed full of interesting information. I could have written numerous blog posts based on this book and, indeed, it has informed much of my blogging about Quebec, but particularly the blog post I did on winter. 

Grescoe is originally from Ontario, so looks at Quebec, as I the reader did, with an outsider's point of view. Whilst I found it hard to see any logic behind the flow of themes in his book, it's an incredibly comprehensive text and he covers everything from the Quebecois obsession with ice-hockey to the Pepsi/Cola wars, the Quiet Revolution and a culture reared on téléromans! There isn't much about Quebec culture that Grescoe doesn't cover and I feel that this amazing book must have been a real labour of love. 

Barney's Version (1997) Mordechai Richler

I struggled through Richler's seminal novel Barney's Version, which also took me ages to read, but not for the right reasons this time. Don't get me wrong, the book was interesting enough and the themes of loss of love and loss of memory were very engaging, but I just couldn't relate to Barney the principle character and his self-obsessed view of the world. It might sound a bit harsh but, in the end, I was more interested in hearing McIver's version or Boogie's version.

It took me a long time to read this book because I was practising something I call 'intense reading'. In the interests of reading fluency, we mostly skip over words or expressions that are unfamiliar to us and accept them in the context of whatever it is we're reading, as they don't usually impede our general understanding of the text. 

For example, if I come across the phrase 'He put on his trusty Capezio's' - I have no idea what Capezio really means, but I can assume that it's something you might wear. Instead of skimming over this, as I might normally do, intense reading means doing my research, usually on Wikipedia, where I find out that Capezio was a Sicilian cobbler who emigrated to the United States in 1887 and opened a shoe repair shop near the Metropolitan Opera House, which became a meeting place for dancers and ultimately a fashionable place to buy shoes! 

Barney's version was peppered with references and name-dropping - much of it Canadian/North American and therefore unfamiliar to me, so I had a great time doing my research as I was reading this book and really learning about the world! 

The Middle of Everywhere (2009) Monique Polak

By contrast, I flew through this book in less than a week - perhaps not surprising as it was written for young adults and was very easy to read. I really enjoyed this book which tells the story of Noah Thorpe, a teenage boy from Montreal who travels to Kangiqsualujjuaq (George River) in Nunavik, the northern-most part of Quebec. 

It's a lovely story, beautifully written and well-paced, which I'm sure will leave a positive impression of Inuktitut culture on any young person reading the book. There is a real shadow hanging over Quebecois history in relation to the Inuit people and Polak bravely confronts this, particularly in her re-telling of the destruction of Inuit sled dogs between 1950 and 1970, by the Canadian Mounted Police. She somehow manages to apologise for non-native actions whilst maintaining a balance in terms of who was really to blame.  

L'Avalée des avalés (1966) Réjean Ducharme

This is a fascinating novel, although I didn't have time to read all of it, plus I was reading in French, so it was taking me ages.  To be honest, I don't know how the book would read in translation, as the language is so poetic and even the title L'Avalée des avalés is hard to translate into English and becomes something like, The Swallowing of the Swallowed.

L'Avalée des avalés is a modern Gothic tale, set in an abandoned Abbey, on an island in the middle of the St Laurence River. It tells the story of a young girl, Bérénice Einberg, whose father is Jewish and whose mother is Christian.  Enforced religious belief plays a big part in the early chapters of the novel and other themes include sibling love and envy, repression of girls/women and Bérénice's extraordinary 'disconnection' from the world around her.

La vie ne se passe sur la terre, mais dans ma tête. La vie est dans ma tête et ma tête est dans la vie. Je suis englobante et englobée. Je suis l'avalée de l'avalé. 

Life doesn't happen on the earth, but in my head. Life is in my head and my head is in life. I am encompassing and encompassed.  I am the swallowing of the swallowed.

La grosse Femme d'à côté est enceinte/The fat woman from next door is pregnant (1978) Michel Tremblay

I read even less of Michel Tremblay's famous novel, La grosse Femme d'à côté est enceinte. It's partly written in joual, the dialect of Montreal and I found myself floundering with sentences like this one:

Mercedes avait sorti son rouge à lèvres de sa sacoche.  Un billet de vingt dollars était tombe sur ses genoux. "Y'a ben de l'ouvrage dans c'que je fais, ces temps-citte, t'sais . . ."

Mecedes took her lipstick out of her little bag. A twenty-dollar bill fell on her knees. "It's hard work what I'm doing at the minute you know . . ."

The books I didn't read

As usual, I came across references to lots of books which I didn't have time to read - if I were to continue blogging about Quebec indefinitely, I'd put the following books on my reading list:

Self (1996) by Yann Martel (the author of Life of Pi)

Beautiful Losers (1966) by Leonard Cohen

A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866) by Henry David Thoreau

Je mange donc, je maigris - I eat therefore, I stay slim (1987) by Michel Montignac

Bonheur d'Occasion/The Tin Flute (1945) by Gabrielle Roy

L’homme rapaillé/The March to Love (1970) by Gaston Miron

Two Solitudes (1945) by Hugh McLennan

Herzog (1964) by Saul Bellow

L'ingratitude (1992) by Ying Chen

Le sexe des étoiles/The Sex of the Stars (1987) by Monique Proulx

Selling Illusions: The Cult of Multiculturalism in Canada (1994) by Neil Bissoondath

Et Dieu Crea Les Francais (1992) by Louis-Bernard Robitaille

Les Filles du Caleb/Caleb's daughters (1986) by Arlette Cousture

Le Cassé/The Broken (1964) by Jacques Renaud

The Shouting Signpainters (1972) by Malcolm Reid

Contes du pays incertain/Stories from an uncertain country (1962) by Jacques Ferron

Quebec - My Country is Winter

It's hard to blog about Quebec at this time of the year and not notice how cold the temperature there is right now. I always have quite a few cities around the world displayed on the weather apps on my phone. (What, weather obsessed? No, not me!) With a low today of -19 Celsius (-2.2 Fahrenheit) Montreal is the second-coldest place on my list and only Ulan Bator in Mongolia has a lower temperature (-21 C/-5.8 F)

With an average 141 days of snow per year, Schefferville, on the border with Newfoundland and Labrador, is the snowiest place in Quebec and Quebec itself is one of the snowiest places in the world, its main rivals being Kamchatka and northern Japan. 

Quebec City hosts a winter carnival every year, this year's carnival is starting next week, on the 30th of January 2015. As well as events, workshops and bemused tourists, the carnival also has a mascot, Le Bonhomme - a kind of gigantic snowman - and was first held in 1894. It attracts around a million visitors a year and is one of the world's biggest winter festivals. 

Rue Pontiac in Montreal by Jonathan Malboeuf

Winter plays a very important role in Quebecois culture and, traditionally, it was a time when people would retreat to their log cabins and live off fruits they'd preserved after one of the world's shortest harvests. In a modern age, where year-long productivity is the norm, it's hard to imagine a whole society going into hibernation in this way and, indeed, one of the things that shocked me most about Quebec was the fact that people only get around 10 days paid holiday every year!

In his book, Sacré Blues: An unsentimental journey through Quebec (2000) Taras Grescoe talks about this period of retreat and how it quite possibly led to the creation of great art - people in Quebec love their actors, poets and musicians. He also claims that people in modern-day Quebec have declared war on winter. Montreal has one of the world's most aggressive snow-removal policies and it costs the city around $54 million dollars a year to keep the streets snow-free. 

Un appel etrange by Jonathan Malboeuf

Grescoe provides even more evidence than Quebec is at war with winter, for example, he highlights the fact that modern movies about Quebec tend to be set in summer and winter is no longer celebrated. Thinking of the movies I've watched as part of my research, this is definitely true and I can think of very few winter scenes and, even when winter scenes are included, they represent a low-point, psychologically, in the narrative. 

Grescoe also points out that around 10% of the Quebec's population heads south during the winter months, mostly to resorts in Florida like Hallandale and Hollywood Beach. Winter costs a lot of money; people have to buy medicine and winter clothes, cars deteriorate quicker in Quebec than in other parts of Canada and roads need constant repair after the winter season.  

But winter encourages a sense of community life over individualism and, surely, this is a very Quebecois characteristic, at odds with other North American cultures, which seem to put the needs of the individual above all else? 

In one of his most famous and popular songs, the singer Gilles Vigneault proclaims:

Mon pays c'est ne pas un pays, c'est l'hiver

(My country is not a country, it's winter)

And it makes one wonder what ever happened to the love of winter in Quebec? 

Given the evidence of global warming and the fact that we modern generations have been experiencing much milder winters than our predecessors experienced (even in places like Canada!), winter is fast becoming an 'endangered season'. 

I know it's easy to say for me to say this, sitting in the pleasant and relatively balmy winter of southern England, but I kind of wish we could all appreciate winter a bit more. Okay, it causes inconveniences, meetings need to be cancelled, business grinds to a halt, but why not throw another log on the fire, start reading a good book and just enjoy the break from constant activity?

Image credits:

For this blog post, I wanted to highlight the photography of Flickr member. Mr Urbain, aka Jonathan Malboeuf. You can see more of Jonathan's pictures on his photo stream. Thanks Jonathan for sharing these with us, using the Creative Commons license.