I wanted to learn how to live alone. I’d never done it. I’d always taken elaborate care to avoid solitude. I’d been single for two months over ten years. Almost never slept alone. I’d built relationships just to have someone, and I’d had sex for the same reason.

At that point, I thought I had to choose between my marriage and my novel. I had to totally commit to one or the other. The novel demanded I go further, be alone, always more alone. And I had nothing else, only writing could still save my skin. If I kept trying to write the book without making any compromises in my life, the story would fall flat. Another banal record of heartbreak. Why did I believe so strongly that I needed to write? Why was it so important? Because it was saving me. That verb again. It was important because it took over everything. Because it forced me to ruin myself for a better story. Maybe that was cheating. But I was the one making the rules. I was the queen here in the country of my novel.

I told Guillaume I needed to be alone. A first step. We agreed on a few days. He went to his parents’ place. It wasn’t enough. I wanted to move, to find an empty room, live there with nothing but a mattress on the floor, a rug, my computer, headphones and a bookshelf. I’d leave him everything else. I saw it as a test. I would break myself into pieces. I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it, wouldn’t be able to face myself. A disaster. I scoured apartment listings. I looked for white walls. A clean bathtub. I talked it over with Guillaume. We cried in each other’s arms. It was the first time we’d touched in weeks. I couldn’t believe we’d reached this point.

The book was going to be about an open marriage, but it was turning into something else. It ended up being about I don’t know quite what anymore. About the torment of no longer loving someone who’d saved me, who could make me happy, who loved me, whom I loved. About no longer loving that person and loving someone else, someone imperfect, a stranger. No longer loving the man I wanted to love forever. Or dare I write it: no longer loving the man I had wanted to love forever.

::

Guillaume in Paris, 2012. He’d left at the beginning of October. The first, I think. He’d walked me to the bus stop. I had to work, hadn’t managed to get the day off. I looked at him standing at the corner, knowing the days ahead would be hard. I came home that night to an empty apartment.

A few days earlier I’d written: “In six days, you’ll be on a plane. I’ll close the door behind you, set up a space to write and finally try to finish my novel. I’ll tie my hands to the keyboard, chain my body to the chair. I’ll only get up to attend to basic functions. I’ll hope to reach a state of vertigo, total isolation, and I’ll be able to let the idea flow free. I will live and breathe the book.” I’d written those lines in the future, likely already knowing that things wouldn’t go that way. I did write a lot those months we were apart, but mostly I’d wandered, written about longing, neglected my novel.

“If it weren’t for the cat, I’d have already gone to my mother’s. Even though the cat wakes me up at night with her extra claw clacking on the floor, her obsession with nudging things off my desk. I’m surprised at myself for being mean to her. I love that little cat. She looks after me. You’re one of the few who know I can’t sleep with the lights off, can’t close the bedroom door. Without you here, the room seems to go on forever. It’s a kind of inverse claustrophobia, where the space keeps expanding and I get lost.”

I’d gotten through the months without him, my friends there to hold me up.

::

He showed up at the house around twenty to six. He rang the bell. I buzzed him in. He came upstairs, probably in the elevator, and knocked. I opened the door. I looked at him. I sat on the bench to give him time to take off his shoes. He said: I won’t stay long.

We went into the office. I offered him a beer. He said no. He got up to go to the bathroom. I finished writing an email while he was gone. He came back, petted the cat. She liked him, had never bitten him. I took it as a sign. I trusted her instincts, could rely on them. He came over and sat next to me, and while he looked for music on the computer I unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants.

I put my shirt back on and cuddled in close to him. I said: you let me get close to you because you weren’t afraid I’d get attached, because I’m married. But now, if I leave my husband, are you going to pull away? I’m afraid of not seeing you anymore. I’m being as honest as I can be. I know you don’t want a relationship. We could keep seeing each other according to the rules, once a week.

I’ve forgotten the rest of the conversation. It’s a flaw of mine, throwing out questions without listening to the answers. The answers must have been vague. Ambiguous. Hesitation, then an “I don’t know.” We kissed in the hall. He said: you’re good for me.

I said: you’re good for me too.

He left, and I slept alone that night.

::

The further I got in the novel, the more urgent it became for me to make a radical change in my life. For the moment, I didn’t see that change coming. I didn’t want the book to be a blip in my emotional development. A writerly experiment with misery. I had to be fully and truly committed. If I wanted to put writing at the centre of my existence, I had to go all the way. Solitude was the only possible answer. The act that would ask the most of me. I thought about what Annie Ernaux says in L’écriture comme un couteau: “I also resisted diving into the writing of The Frozen Woman. I suspected that, consciously or not, I was endangering my personal life, that when I finished the book I would be separated from my husband. Which is what happened.”

Thinking so hard about the relationships in my life could only lead me to cast doubt on everything, on my marriage, myself. I was slipping. I wanted to slip.

::

I was alone in the canal, hair down to my feet and full of shells and dead leaves, seaweed under my arms. My breasts bare. I was singing “Wicked Game” à la Pipilotti Rist. But there was no one to hear me. Ten past ten, no moon. I was waiting for him, reviewing everything I had to say to him, most of it trivial. Would he come? Did he want me? An emotionally dependent mermaid. Only able to find happiness in another. I polished myself, scrubbed my skin until it glistened. I wanted to become that precious thing he’d want to keep forever.

by Maude Veilleux. Translated by Aleshia Jensen and Aimee Wall. Forthcoming in translation from QC Fiction, June 2019.

Also, come back later for an excerpt from����by��Maude Veilleux, and translated from the French by��Aleshia Jensen��&��Aimee Wall, and forthcoming from QC Fiction in June 2019.

We’ve shared a few pints in the pub before, and corresponded a bit, but for everyone else reading this, could you introduce yourself and explain a bit of how you came to live in Quebec City, translating massive Quebecois books and running ?

So maybe it’s best if everyone else begins by imagining me talking about Quebec literature in an Irish accent. I’m from close to Belfast originally (which explains the accent). I studied French and German literature at Cambridge University and then moved to Quebec City (just because it’s a lovely place to live and I wanted to live my life in French) in 2003.

To be very honest, I think I got into Quebec literature because I didn’t know much about it and had no idea that it had a reputation, at the time, for being not particularly good. There were obviously a few big writers (who I didn’t know of yet) but I had none of the preconceptions a Canadian might have had. I hadn’t been forced to read dry Quebec writers in academic translations at school. I had no idea who any of these people were. I could just walk into a bookstore and pick up anyone at all. It was a whole new world.

Luckily for me, the first book I picked up happened to be Bestiaire by Eric Dupont. I absolutely loved it. You can tell a lot about the tone by the cover.

There’s something so blissful and quirky about the writing that I just love. I was working as an in-house translator at the time and reading Eric Dupont made me want to drop everything and start translating Quebec literature instead. I pitched and pitched it and no one was interested. So instead I pitched other books and began translating fairly regularly for , a small press in Montreal that focuses on history and politics with an accent on Québec.

What was your motivation behind starting ?

Whenever I translated fiction for Baraka, there was always a link to Quebec and its history. The books were good, but none of them ever really took off. After a few years of this, I approached the publisher Robin Philpot and said, “Look, why don’t we start an imprint? I’ll run it for you and we’ll just translate and publish the best books we can get. It doesn’t need to be historical fiction or tied to Quebec in some way. We’ll just do young, up-and-coming writers from Quebec who have something to say.”

Eric Dupont and Bestiaire (which I translated as ) seemed the natural place to start.

Since I always get this question, I’m going to throw it back at you: What type of books does want to publish?

We’ve just started our fourth year of publishing and it feels as though people are starting to pay more attention to what we’re doing, which is great. Right from the start, we’ve been trying hard to do things differently. This has meant giving a chance to young translators, most of whom have never been published before. Most of our books are first novels. And more than anything, I aim to publish idiomatic, readable translations for the international market.

For too long, much of Quebec literature was translated by the same two to three people. This is starting to change, and I’m happy to be playing a small part in bringing about that change.

As a reader, I want a story. So tries to publish storytellers, although obviously we’re after really great writing as well. But we’re not experimental. I want a good story, well told, and then I ask a young translator to take their time and make a great job of it. We then spend a long time working through the translation together, polishing it, asking the author plenty of questions. From start to finish, our translation philosophy is: what would the writer have put had they been writing in English? How would this sound naturally?

How would you judge your first three years of publishing?

Honestly? I don’t know. There are definitely ups and downs. There are days when I feel disillusioned with the whole thing and other times when I feel like I have the best job in the world. Every time I go to a book fair, I have this overriding sense that I’m in the right place, where I should be, with likeminded people. We’re all in it together. For me, there’s nothing more important than culture, and I’m genuinely happy to be working in culture.

, one of my translations for QC Fiction, was a finalist for the Giller Prize last fall. The Giller Prize is absolutely huge in Canada. It’s basically our Man Booker. The award ceremony is broadcast live on national TV, there are interviews everywhere, they flew us to events in New York and England . . . it was massive, particularly for a tiny press like us. Being one of the five finalists was a game-changer. There’s been real interest in Songs for the Cold of Heart from international publishers, I think sales were upwards of 6,000 copies in Canada by the end of 2018. It’s been huge. It’s been great.

And then there are days when I wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t been lucky enough to be shortlisted for such a huge prize. The book would have just disappeared. No one would have talked about it, hardly anyone would have reviewed it, and we would have lost money on a great book and perhaps compromised the future of QC Fiction. It wouldn’t have gotten all this praise. And that would have been so disheartening for what is such a good book. (Like any novel, it’s not for everyone, but I think it’s a good book!) So on good days I’m grateful for what was such a fun, once-in-a-lifetime experience. And on bad days, I wonder just how dependent on prizes (and luck) we all are in order for a book to sell and be deemed a success.

In a broader perspective—and for the benefit of readers like me, who don’t know a ton about Quebecois writing—are there any general trends, or particular movements, or ages, in Quebecois literature? Who are the handful of writers we should be reading?

These are questions I try my best to answer at my blog, . We’ve been publishing weekly interviews, excerpts, and reviews of books (which often haven’t been translated into English yet) for coming up on five years now. We try to take a close look at the nuts and bolts of the translation process. We ask booksellers and authors and translators what they’re reading. What makes a book from Quebec a book from Quebec?

As everyone is keen to point out to me, there are no hard and fast answers. Very quickly, what I would say is that Quebec literature (like Quebecers themselves) likes to take chances. There is very little respect for norms and authority. There’s obviously a broad spectrum of writers and writing out there, but a lot of what’s published in French is irreverent and slangy and largely untranslated. The more serious, literary writers tend to make it over into English and this is another thing I’m trying to redress with QC Fiction, with books like (whose tone flirts with chick lit at times, before becoming something very different) or , a mockumentary-style, fictional biography of Michael Bay, or our next book, , which belongs to this tradition of writing that doesn’t take itself too seriously, but nevertheless has plenty of interesting things to say.

We’re in a bit of a golden age for Quebec literature. We’re fortunate to have writers like Eric Dupont, Christian Guay-Poliquin, Catherine Leroux, and Daniel Grenier being published by quality presses, in French and in English.

There is a lot of interest in Quebec literature at the moment. As you pointed out here a couple of weeks ago, the number of translations from Quebec doubled between 2015 and 2016. What remains to be seen is whether this interest is sustainable, whether it is reflected in growing interest in Quebec writers, or whether it will turn out to be something of a bubble and publishing houses in the rest of Canada, and around the world, will be paying less attention to Quebec writers ten or fifteen years from now.

Not to mention, Canada is the inspiration behind one of the best sketches on the Kroll Show.��

Canada is also home to a number of great small presses, many of which get little to no play here in the U.S. So over the next month, we’re going to be running a few different things: Every week I’ll be highlighting one or more books from a different Canadian press, P.T. Smith will be writing about his favorite Quebecois titles, there will be interviews with a number of indie press publishers, and excerpts of forthcoming books.

As per usual, the goal is to highlight more obscure gems, bring attention to presses and writers you might not have heard of already, and have a bit of fun along the way. By no means will this be a comprehensive overview of Canadian publishing (for something along those lines, check out ), but it should provide a few different pathways for curious readers to explore.

*

Let’s get started with the featured press of this week: QC Fiction, started and run by Peter McCambridge, who is also a translator, and is based in Quebec City. There’s an interview going up on Wednesday with Peter that covers a lot of ground regarding and whatnot, so I’ll skip over all that for now and just focus on their books.

Along the same lines, since I published a post in December with a lot of infographics on Quebec translations, I’m going to skip the nerdy stat stuff for a second week running. (When is baseball coming back? IN 53 DAYS.)

In prepping the post for Thursday with Peter, two things jumped out at me: 1) his interest in working with “new translators,” and 2) that it must be really fun to design a website when you only have ten titles in print. Look at this ! So clean, so easy to use. All the information is right there. Click on “Books,” and you can see all their books right there. We’re about to undertake another redesign of the Open Letter website, and god damn does it seem like a nightmare. We have to copy over data from over 110 different books and figure out a logical organization for all the info on our website. Maybe we should just KonMari it all. ONLY 30 BOOKS GIVE US JOY!

Anyway, given how reasonable the QC Fiction list is, I decided that this week I would just go through all of their titles in hopes that you’ll all find one worth reading and go buy it. (If there’s one aspiration I have for this year of Three Percent, it’s that by the end of the year, everyone reading these posts will buy a book a month from whichever presses/countries are being featured. It’s hard to overstate what a huge impact that would have for most of these books/presses. A thousand extra sales is quite significant for anyone smaller than PRH.)

by Charles Quimper, translated from the French by Guil Lefebrve

When I put together the schedule for February’s posts, I knew I was going to start with QC, so I grabbed two of the shortest books of theirs we had in the office and read them both on consecutive days. In Every Wave—a 78-page novella—is a heart-wrenching book. It’s not the sort of book that the parent of a young child should be reading . . .

Basic plot: While camping, a young father’s daughter wanders away. He loses track of her for a second, think she’s with his wife, sees her in the water drowning. They never find the body. His marriage breaks down, his mind breaks down. He comes to believe that fragments of her body can be found in various bodies of water and sets sail for the open seas, hoping to be reunited with her.

On behalf of all other parents, fuck me for posting this, but this is the paragraph that got to me. The book is much more powerful as a whole than in any given section, but this one bit hits so close to the bone that I couldn’t help but inwardly cringe as I read it.

If I had known you’d be with us for such a short time, I would have kept you awake every moment of it. I would have fought sleep with everything I had. If we had to sleep, it would be together in your little bed. I should have watched when you jumped off the highest diving board at the swimming pool or when you went down the big slide at the park. If I’d known, I would really have watched, instead of pretending to.

(I slightly edited that, because I think it’s more powerful this way. Sorry, Peter.)

Although it’s different in style, if you like The Private Lives of Trees, I would recommend this book.

by David Clerson, translated from the French by Katia Grubisic

This is the other QC Fiction book I read this week. Longer and more surreal than In Every Wave, but also quite interesting. It’s the story of two brothers—and older one missing an arm, and a younger one who was created from that missing arm—and their quest for their “dog father.”

It’s a book that has no clear location, and shifts between realism and something other over and again. Mostly in the “A Dog’s Life” section in which the older brother becomes a dog. And then SPOILER ALERT murders the fuck out of the family that has taken him in. In some ways, it feels like a grand fairy tale, or maybe allegory, although one whose meaning is not immediately transparent.

To give you a sense of the weirdness of this book, here’s a paragraph from where the brothers’ mother is explaining to the older brother how, when he was a newborn, she created his younger brother:

“[. . .] You were lying on the stone. You looked at me with your big black eyes and I was crying and singing. I took a knife with a sharp blade, I held your left arm, and I cut it off, my eyes closed, still singing. I will never forget your screams, but I knew what I was doing, I knew the ritual: it gives life, erases solitude, and I told myself it was for the best, it was the best thing a mother could do. I covered the wound with a paste of herbs and clay to help you heal, and I kissed your forehead again, still singing for you as you cried and screamed in pain. You don’t hold it against me, do you? Tell me you could never hold it against me. (The older brother looked at her with his dark eyes, his gaze telling her that he didn’t blame her, that he could never hold it against her.) I don’t think I could regret what I did . . .”

She had told him that his brother had been shaped from his severed limb, and born with two stumpy arms, imperfect but attached to a body that was intact, the body of his brother, with whom he loved to run along the shore and in the hills, and who like him had deep, dark eyes, the same eyes they both shared, the same look of brothers.

For fans of Can Xue and Mercè Rodoreda.

by Mathieu Poulin, translated from the French by Alesha Jensen

Initially, I was going to read this book for this post. The premise—that this is a mockumentary treating all of Michael Bay’s movies as if they were academic art—is really intriguing. But then I looked up Michael Bay movies on IMDB. Out of the thirteen full-length movies he’s directed, I’ve seen a grand total of ZERO. @ me. @ me all you want. These movies look and sound like garbage. I’m proud of myself for avoiding Transformers: Age of Extinction. Isn’t Michael Bay responsible for Shia LeBouf thinking MK Ultra was infiltrating his life?

Main point: I don’t think I would get all the jokes in this book because I don’t know the source material.

Here are a couple chapter headings to entertain you:

On the Dangers of Driving a Tanker Truck Through Rush Hour Traffic

On Abduction

On the Evocative Power of Orange Trees

On Confusion

I have a feeling this book is a lot of fun.

and by Eric Dupont, translated by Peter McCambridge

This comes up in Thursday’s interview, but Songs for the Cold of Heart really shored up QC Fiction’s reputation in the minds of readers, booksellers, and critics. Shortlisted for the Giller Award (Canada’s version of the National Book Awards, but way way way more indie-press friendly), it sold more copies than any Open Letter title has to date. Which is great! This book is 608 pages long, and exactly the sort of title that could cripple a small press.

Aside from the note that “this novel warms the heart,” it totally sounds up my alley. Long; stories within stories; Garcia Marquez + John Irving (two authors I read a lot of in college, and who I think of when I’m feeling nostalgic); ambitious in scope and structure . . . What’s best though is this quote from the Giller judges:

As magnificent a work of irony and magic as the boldest works of Gabriel García Márquez, but with a wholly original sensibility that captures the marvelous obsessions of the Québécois zeitgeist of the 20th century. It is, without a doubt, a tour de force. And the translation is as exquisite as a snowflake.

Amazing blurb, but also SNOWFLAKE.

Life in the Court of Matane was the first book QC ever published. It was a book Peter fell in love with that inspired him to start the imprint. My copy is buried somewhere in my daughter’s room. I gave it to her to read, since she LOVES LOVES LOVES Nadia Comăneci, whose gold medal performance sets this novel in motion. I can’t find it right now, although I suspect it’s hidden behind the Philip K. Dick, David Mitchell, and Haruki Murakami books she’s taken from the main bookshelves into her room.

It’s really nice to live with a teenager who reads. The other day her friend was asking her about the “worst book she ever read” and the “worst movie adaptation of a book.” I forget the worst book answer (is The Snow Child a thing? Like, a book that Rochester Reads All One Book And Only One might have featured?), but she was MEGA-PISSED at the��Ready Player One movie��for eliminating all the LGBT aspects that exist in the book. The kids are alright, yo.

by Laurence Leduc-Primeau, translated from the French by Natalia Hero

I know next to nothing about this book, yet will definitely read it when we get a galley because a) the main character is Chloë (my daughter’s name), b) it’s “biting and sarcastic,” and c) I like the name “Natalia Hero.” It’s like judging a book by its cover, but more idiosyncratically.

by Maude Veilleux, translated from the French by Alesha Jensen & Aimee Wall

Not going to say anything about this book here, except “open marriage” and “excerpted on Three Percent this Wednesday.” TUNE IN.

(All my lingo for teasers comes from the radio era. It’s weird how these terms have evolved over time and become more and more distant and asynchronous. “Must See Thursday.” “Visit again next Tuesday.” “Click on my Medium article.” “Episodes post every Thursday and are available at Stitcher.” “Plz rt.” I can’t wait till all this falls apart and we have to talk to one another again in real time.)

by Jean-Michel Fortier, translated from the French by Katherine Hastings

One of the problems with reading copy from a press you already like is that every book sounds like something worth reading.

There’s no shortage of intrigue in this offbeat debut novel by Jean-Michel Fortier: an unnamed village, a strange and anonymous narrator, an unsolved murder, a mysterious huntsman, and a wisdom tooth extraction gone terribly wrong.

I MUST KNOW MORE.

Two quick observations: 1) aside from Katia and Peter, I have never met or corresponded with any of these other translators, reinforcing Peter’s statement that they want to work with new translators, which I find incredibly admirable and cool, and 2) Publishers Weekly has reviewed most, if not all, of the books listed so far. That’s fantastic. I wonder how many indie bookstores in America are stocking these books. If any of you have these books, let me know and I’ll feature you here and tweet about you to all the Open Letter followers. Better yet—send us a photo of QC Fiction titles in your stores and we’ll spread the love as far and wide as we can.

by Melissa Verreault, translated from the French by Arielle Aaronson

If you’re betting over/under on when this post goes off the rails, the specific moment is word number 2267.

(I really want to run a crazy ass book and publishing gambling empire. Not just annual bets on who is going to win the Nobel, but daily betting on sales volume, ebook percentages of overall sales, etc. It would be incredible—and incredibly nerdy—to have some sort of “Fantasy Publishing” league in which scouts and editors and booksellers compete with one another, drafting young writers, new manuscripts, stalwarts of the Patterson variety, all in hopes of out-earning their competitors. Let’s go all moneyball on this shit.)

Rails. Off.

Way back in the day. Like, maybe the first April I was living in Rochester, I was invited to the Bleu Metropolis festival in Montreal. It was a really interesting experience—I got lost because I had no international cell service and drove around randomly for an hour listening to Banco de Gaia—and turned me on to one of the best literary festivals in the hemisphere. Anyway, anyway, my personal interpreter for the French stuff was a student in the Concordia University program in Translation Studies. I can’t remember her name, but reading Arielle Aaronson’s bio (she graduated from that program) reminded me of how funny and entertaining this interpreter was. I remember leaving that festival thinking about how my sense of humor is super Canadian. (My family is part Canadian. But I think it goes beyond blood into some weird mental space of self-deprecating + slightly schizophrenic joke modes.)

It would be hilarious and charming and all that if Arielle had been my interpreter. Also, Concordia is a great word.

by Veronique Cote and Steve Gagnon, and translated from languages by HOLYSHITTHATISALOTOFNAMES

Again, I’m good for about 2,000 words. So this is what this book is:

The local and the universal come together in these 37 short stories, brought into English by 37 different translators from all over the world.

The result gives readers a flavour of the fresh new writing��coming out of Quebec—and a reminder that there are at least 37 different ways to translate an author’s voice.

I’m probably misremembering (this book is sitting on my desk at work), but it’s the same couple stories translated over and over by a bunch of different translators. (I need to incorporate this into my “World Literature & Translation” class . . . ) Here’s one more bit from the QC Fiction website:

This project aims to show there are all kinds of ways to bring across an author’s voice in translation . . . at least 37 of them! Translators include literary translation students, first-time and up-and-coming literary translators, world-renowned translators who have won major international prizes, some of Montreal’s best writers and translators, a retired high-school French teacher in Ireland, and francophone authors translating into their second language. There are even people in there who (armed only with a dictionary and the priceless ability to write a beautiful sentence) barely speak French.

Yes! This is so perfect for teaching . . .

by Pierre-Luc Landry, translated from the French by Arielle Aaronson and Madeleine Stratford

In addition to PW, the other person who reviews a lot of these books is Tony’s Reading List.��Which reminds me: That article about the death of literary blogs from the other week? Ouch. It’s not wrong—the literary “conversation” is now all IG and LitHub—but it doesn’t have to be. The death of GoogleReader fucked over so many websites, and the new web strategy of exclusive content from content providers (aka publishers) plus daily newsletters that cherry pick the rest of the internet in a way that make it seem like selection is creation is all unfortunate, but we can rise again. The vast majority of popular book websites are commercial AF. They don’t cover interesting books, have no interesting opinions, try to elevate using strategies that are so Amazon. And pay no one. This is unsustainable, and after all those sites fade away—see all the recent reductions in staff at HuffPo, BuzzFeed, Vice—it will be back to all of us indie voices to remind readers we still exist. That our words aren’t sponsored, aren’t cute tweets, are more than a photo with a paragraph of gush . . . Blogs still have value, even if the trend right now is to ignore things that are long and/or thoughtful. Time is a tight spiral that repeats over and over. Jeremy Bearimy, baby.