French-Canadian and Québécois Novels

Ronald Conrad is a professor of English at the Ryerson Polytechnical
Institute in Toronto.

This volume in Oxford’s “Perspectives on Canadian Culture” series
should prove useful to both the general reader and the student. It gives
a clear and direct overview of its subject, focusing on major authors.
Although it chronicles the sparse beginnings of the novel in Quebec, it
soon moves to the recent decades of evocative and experimental writing.

Shek, a critic of Quebec literature and professor of French at
University of Toronto, devotes sections to “The Long Gestation:
1837-1937,” “The Modern Novel: 1938-1959,” “The Sixties,”
“The Emergence of the Feminist ‘I’,” and “The Last Twenty
Years.” His appraisal of the 1960s is particularly strong, well linked
to the tumult of the Quiet Revolution. This chapter clearly embodies
Shek’s critical stance, which he calls in the preface “a
socio-critical and ideological reading.”

Those whose interests are textual will find less in this volume, but
that is fitting, since the book is clearly an introduction, particularly
for those who do not read French (almost all titles and quotations are
translated into English, which becomes repetitious for the bilingual
reader).

The short Appendix I, which Shek’s son helped write, is one of the
best parts: it suggests why translations of fiction are crucial to this
nation of two solitudes, points out how so many have been weak, and
shows exactly how they can go wrong.

Though small flaws such as jargon mar Shek’s writing here and there,
the book does a service to both solitudes in explaining so clearly to
the one a cultural matter so representative of the other.