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Reviews 245 Proulx, Monique. Ce qu’il reste de moi. Montréal: Boréal, 2015. ISBN 978-2-76462381 -2. Pp. 432. $22 Can. In crafting this sprawling novel, Proulx appears to have done a lot of thinking about God and Montreal. Or, perhaps more specifically, God in Montreal. Connected only by regular episodes in the life of historical figure Jeanne Mance, the French nurse who was among the early settlers of Montreal and a founder of its Hôtel-Dieu Hospital in the 1640s, the characters in Ce qu’il reste de moi convey not only the ethnic diversity of Proulx’s adopted hometown, they also reveal its diversity of spiritual experience. A priest performing an exorcism, a young Hassidic Jew who loses his faith and his community,Afghan and Pakistani immigrants struggling to learn French while making a living—most of the novel’s dozens of characters are searching for ways to connect their inner struggles with their existence in a swarming city. A war refugee wrestles with his particular challenges as a single father in Montreal, wondering, “comment penser qu’un homme seul peut parvenir à faire fleurir deux enfants musulmans dans le désert égoïste nord-américain?”(244).A writer admires his productive artist friends’ ability to “offrir comme réponse aux questionnements immatériels leurs formes spectaculairement matérielles” (72). Even the worried reflections of a fictionalized, seventeenth-century Jeanne Mance,whose drive to found a city where French Christians and newly-converted American Indians could flourish together, evoke the swarm-like sense one gets of a place when viewing it primarily as a plurality of human behaviors: “Les Algonquins, les Hurons, les Iroquois alliés succombent dramatiquement à l’alcool, semant chez les Blancs les germes d’un mépris insidieux [...] Plusieurs colons se sont enfuis dans la forêt, gagnés par la barbarie. Ou la liberté”(391–92). This novel is about the spirit of a place, but it is not an easy novel to read, not even for those used to romans-fleuves whose characters’ every act and thought seems to exist in order to designate the teeming life of the city they inhabit. In this book—the first Proulx has published since Champagne (2008)—Proulx has managed a stunning variety of voices in her apparent effort to make them feel both like a city and a surging quest for connection. It is not only the sheer number of different Montrealers that strike readers as we discover this ambitious narrative; it is the intimate and unique way each character wonders about the places in the city he or she is connected to. For places, here, are people, and Proulx’s characters all feel so much like protagonists that it takes several chapters for it to give the impression of a coherent novel. Once it does, it feels more like a symphony. University of Wisconsin, Madison Ritt Deitz ...

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