Un taxi pour Sherbrooke par Monique Le Maner (review)

to Chateaubriand’s biography of Rancé.A friend even says that Debord resembled the seventeenth-century Trappist. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Le Maner, Monique. Un taxi pour Sherbrooke. Montréal: Triptyque, 2013. ISBN 9782 -89031-871-7. Pp. 169. $20 Can. In her sixth novel, this Montreal-based French author continues her exploration of multiple genres and styles. Her earlier work in polars and an enigmatically labeled “fable de rue,”for example,find here a complement in what she calls a“conte québécois” that traces the voyages taken by Yolande, a voyante who fears she has lost her talent of seeing her clients’ impending death. In language suggesting that of a wizened storyteller keen on sharing life-changing truths contained in a fantastical tale, Le Maner’s raconteur paints his narrative picture in broad, self-confident strokes; his Yolande, the seer who may no longer be able to see,will no doubt have much to reveal to the listeners to his tale. The colorful if awkward Yolande has for years offered the sometimes frightening , sometimes calming knowledge of when death will come to residents of Saint-Jérôme. Outside of the hospice-like ward of the local hospital,Yolande has found two clients who particularly want to know when they will die: Mathilde, a recluse convinced that she will be canonized soon after her death because of her epistolary charitable work, and Léo, an orphaned diaper-wearing teenager who sees growing up and growing old as yet more painful time spent in an absence-filled life. Having her own complicated relationship with living ever since the troubling death of her husband,Yolande is frequently discomfited by the visits with these two who seem never to get closer to death. Struck one day, however, by a sight that renders her blind to other visions, Yolande hails a taxi to go find the person she believes stole her talent. Mathilde and Léo, fearful that they may lose their oracle who can speak to them of death, find themselves elbow-to-diaper with Yolande on the taxi’s back seat, a gesture pointing to a desperation that drives them away from their current state in SaintJ érôme. To this menagerie of personages seemingly ill-fitted to life comes Philon, the taxi driver, who both accompanies and guides Yolande’s trip that traverses Quebec in search of an answer to her loss. The many kilometers that separate, or, rather, connect the stops on this quartet’s journey from Saint-Jérôme through Abitibi to Chibougamau and finally Sherbrooke, bring knowledge, appetites, and resolutions that the travelers themselves did not necessarily consciously seek. With his striking looks and gloved hands, Philon may well stand as a modern-day Québécois echo to Jean Cocteau’s Heurtebise, whose crossings of boundaries lead his charges to a more complete understanding of life’s meanings and cycles. This conte’s fantastical flavors may not please all readers; for those willing and able to taste them, however, this fast-moving 272 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 273 tale offers intriguing and stimulating lessons on the multiple savors of a life richly lived in the shadows of death.As she herself comes to see even more broadly across and through originary confines, the voyante Yolande may ultimately model for us the gift of awareness, of sight onto that which is both beyond and within us. Union College (NY) Charles R. Batson Loustalot, Arthur. La ruche. Paris: Lattès, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7096-4474-7. Pp. 186. 16 a. The novel genre is an accommodating crucible to explore “what if”: in this case, what if the children of a broken family could help their parents in transition. Alice and her three teenaged daughters all experience the violence of a troubled husband and father. The daughters try to console their mother whose husband left their household two years ago as the story begins. The back story traces the emotional journey of the broken family. The young women have brought their mother back from an attempted suicide and now continuously try to give her hope and the will to live. The daughters...