Actually Pretty Good: The Future
On Catherine Leroux's Québécois fantasia
Quebecois literature has long gotten short shrift; if Canadian literature suffers from perpetual little brother syndrome compared to American literature, then Québec is the even littler red-headed stepbrother who speaks a whole different language. Even amid the boom of translated literature in the US over the past two decades, the rich vein of Québécois literature has barely been tapped, likely because it doesn’t satisfy the American consumer’s desire for palpable difference (ou peut-etre <<différence>>?) in their translated fiction. Compared to the environs of Four Horsemen of the Translated Literature Boom in the US - Murakami’s Japan, Bolaño’s greater Latin world, Ferrante’s Naples, and Knausgaard’s Scandinavia – Québec is just a bit too close to home. If you wanted something Frenchy-French, you’d pick up something by Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, or one of Michel Houellebecq’s novel-cum-provocations if you were feeling épicé. I even studied Canadian literature as an undergraduate, and my anglophone professors only gave me, over a couple of years, the poetry of Leonard Cohen (another anglo, and Beautiful Losers, his novel of the Quebec separatist movement, was never featured in any of my syllabi) and Irving Layton1 (another anglo), Michel Tremblay’s excellent play Forever Yours Marie-Lou (in translation), and, in my intermediate French class, we were shown Jean-Marc Vallée’s film C.R.A.Z.Y.2 Blame my poor French, and my anglo university, I suppose, for not having more Québécois lit foisted on me, but you’d think the various surveys I had to take would’ve at least given a token nod to Québéc’s literary history. The Canadians we did study, besides Cohen, barely touched the stuff. I can think of only one or two stories in Alice Munro’s entire oeuvre that deal with Québec or even feature Québécois characters; she would much more comfortably head to Miles City, Montana, or even Albania, before setting a story in La Belle Province – quel dommage!
Biblioasis, a small Canadian publisher probably best known stateside for publishing Lucy Ellmann’s titanic 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport, is working to change the dearth of contemporary Quebecois literature (along with work from many other undertranslated countries, such as Poland, Romania, Mozambique, and Guatemala, among others) with their International Translation Series, and the latest release is Catherine Leroux’s The Future, translated by Susan Ouriou. If American readers are looking for a distinctly different setting and milieu in their translated fiction, well, then, look no further; Leroux’s setting is an alternate history version of Detroit where the French settlers never left but the economic devastation that befell the city in the 20th and early 21st century remained. Add in some kind of ecological and societal collapse, and you have a sort of mythic Fort Détroit, somewhere in between an updated version of the wild frontier days of early North American colonization and a presentiment of what’s to come in some hazy climate wracked future:
…other cities perpetuated he fable of immutability: that human constructions are eternal. In Fort Détroit, that myth no longer exists. The impermanence of things, their fragility in the face of the elements, is on full display. Pavement disappears in chunks, sidewalks crumble. The naked trunks holding up electric cables wrlcome the new life that climbs and grafts itself to their porous wood. Houses are gutted, torn apart by fire and neglect. Nature has returned to occupy them; they let themselves be consumed.
The main thread of the novel’s plot follows Gloria, who moves into a decrepit Fort Détroit neighborhood after the murder of her daughter Judith and the disappearance of her two granddaughters, Mathilda and Cassandra. Shacking up in her daughter’s house, Gloria thinks she may be able to find her granddaughters, who went away the night of Judith’s murder under mysterious circumstances. Gloria’s search for her granddaughters and for some clarity on her daughter’s murder lend the story its backbone, and keep things moving along, but Leroux is more interested in the communities that form around the city, principally in Gloria’s neighborhood and in the forests of Parc Rouge, where various gangs of abandoned and runaway children have formed their own camps and proto-societies. Gloria’s neighbors, particularly Eunice next door, find ways to evince care for one another beyond survival or, more cynically for a novelist, helping the protagonist on her putative quest.
She reaches their own vegetable garden, impeccably maintained by both her and [her neighbor] Eunice in the middle of the tangled grasslands. Along the trail, her steps create a living wave, dozens of grasshoppers jumping, hundreds of flies rising. From afar, her house looks different […] Once there, she picks up the laundry basket. Francelin [another neighbor] helped her install a clothes rack in the middle of the yard. Her blouses quiver in the wind, in the crickets’ chorus of secrets. Voices echo all over Fort Détroit; everything whispers and speaks, everything sighs all the time. It took her a month and a half to begin to hear and assimilate what is neither a recital nor an incantation, more like a list whose words, lined up end to end, tear away the world’s opacity.
A shared garden, a clothesline; these are small gestures that bring Gloria into a community, and also enmesh her in the world, removing a layer of its “opacity” and mystery. Meanwhile, among the children of Parc Rouge, new forms of companionship with both each other and the land are formed in, if not a kind of Edenic space, then somewhere just East of it.
Farther along, a mini, a boy, cries from exhaustion as does an older girl with a nosebleed – a rule of thumb in the ravine is that there are always one or two children crying, two or three laughing and fighting, half a dozen who are sleeping, a few emptying their intestines after having ingested unripe fruit or stagnant water, and one caught in the throes of death. Their lives are short and magical, hard and full…
Where other survivalist novels, post-apocalyptic or no, normally focus on the dearth of the landscape and the scarcity of food and material – think, typically of the genre, of the wasteland of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – Leroux is much more interested in rebirth and the resiliency of the land, on how nature might take back its space and remain bountiful to a resourceful and more humbled humanity.
One day there will be rain for long stretches of time, kilometres, years of rain, which will create new lakes and new rivers, streams of water that will feed the earth, and the world will be cleansed. One day, the ground will long to open to reveal hidden treasures, buried veins, to let the sun caress what darkness held prisoner too long. One day, fruit will speak, tell of its own weight, its honey, the dreams it dreams at night. One day, entire sections of the city will collapse to let in the sky. Empty shirts will fly, fluttering like flags, wounds will open inside wounds to illuminate them, one great word will eclipse all desires, curses, songs, committals, roses, bolts from the blue, wayfarers brought down by the light. The animals will sort themselves out, they will create new paths, feeding trails. There will be noise, voices that don’t say it all, pages of rhythms to order time, one single bell to bring space alive. We know nothing till we know. We cannot understand till we can. The future invites itself in, tiny, almost mute in our hands, then takes up al space. The future whispers our names, without others knowing …
With some care and invention, the land can aid rather than serve as adversary, an unusual wrinkle for a piece of Canadian literature, which archetypically pits humanity against an unforgiving force of nature. It’s all a part of Leroux’s vision of a world constantly renewing itself, death and rebirth continual and balanced.
I’m always fascinated when people criticize a translation; barring fluency in a language and a copy of the original, I’m not sure how much criticism is possible beyond how things flow in English. Though my French has improved since my undergrad days, I certainly couldn’t read The Future in the original French. All I can really say is that Ouriou has produced an exceedingly readable translation that ably works across multiple registers. However, I do know enough French to know that something is missing, something that I don’t think any translation could achieve due to the constraints of the English language. There are various patois being spoken in the book, most notably among the children of Parc Rouge, who often speak in the future conditional tense, which, frankly, is just more interesting looking and sounding in French than in English, where we only have paltry constructions like “would be” and “there’d be” as opposed to an alternate verb form. Again, Oriou translates these constructions in an engaging way, but the effect of the patois in English is somewhat less radical than the praise for the book from francophone outlets would suggest it is in French:
‘Did you see the sisters in paradise this morning?’ Fiji asks.
‘They still be thee.’
‘Did they ask to come here?’
‘They’d be too scared. The Big One snivelled the whole time. The Little One barely says nothing.’
‘They still sick?’
‘Not as much. They don’t swagger or sweat no more.’
‘Whattaya think’s wrong with them?’
‘Would’ve been the water, like usual. Or in their heads.’
That, however, is just the ghost you have to chase whenever you read in translation: the original text as read by the fluent reader, with all its innumerable and untranslatable connotations and constructions. Like any piece of writing, translation can only get so close. Ouriou succeeds otherwise in maintaining Leroux’s precise blend of lyricality and her hard edge, juxtaposing beautiful sights and scenes, a kind of conditional future tense form of magical realism wherein time moves forward and backwards along different tracks within a scene, passages from a dog’s perspective, and clear eyed depictions of suffering and destruction. Leroux (and Ouriou) are capable of sentiments like "He expected to die from hunger, cold, and melancholy – he knows how death operates, who it comes for and when: it’s drawn to those already abandoned by the world, the ones nothing can save” as well as pastoral description like “Morning filters in, its bright light penetrating each crack, each fissure on the floor, each gap between small branches, and all the wood creaks, moans, liberates the anguish of the night, almost masking the words of the trees that, in the midst of sorrow, seek to comfort.” It’s in these narrative swerves and attentions to alterity that Leroux rises above the conventions of typical survival narratives and ascends into something more thrillingly unique.
So, why not, as a disaster tourism van in the novel so callously asserts, “DÉCOUVREZ LES RUINES DE FORT DÉTROIT,” where the ruins contain the seeds of a newer, stranger, and maybe somehow better future. Forget even getting around to more of the literature of Québec - how many other alternate history dystopian survival communitarian novels have you ever encountered? C’mon, allons-y, the poutine and Labatt 50’s will be on me.
You can get The Future at your local independent bookstore, local library, or online at Bookshop.org, where purchases support independent bookstores across the country. (Buying from that link also helps out this newsletter).
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His poem “The Swimmer” was particularly controversial in my poetry class, eliciting one of the first “depiction vs endorsement” arguments of my academic career
My professor, with apparent glee, gave us a cheat sheet with translations of all the homophobic slurs used in the film. The other Quebecois cultural products we were exposed to in the French classes were the poems of Émile Nelligan and the songs of Jean Leloup.
Damn dude, this does actually sound pretty good!