The Hunting Ground

Ian C. Nelson, Librarian Emeritus, former Assistant Director of
Libraries (University of Saskatchewan) and dramaturge (Festival de la
Dramaturgie des Prairies).

A small Quebec lakeside community is slowly dying, or worse, is
gradually becoming merely a quaint village for summer tourists and
autumn hunters. People reluctantly adjust their lifestyles to the ebb
and flow of the outsiders, but for the most part remain separate and
insular. The secretive residents keep their most intimate resentments
under cover. Then a murder takes place. In a series of reflectively
isolated stories, Lise Tremblay lets several voices weave a communal
tale in the first person for the reader, presumed to be a privileged
confident. In spite of seething undercurrents of quiet desperation in
these half-dozen households and despite the hunting context of the
book’s title, there is none of the brash horror of a bloody crime nor
the strident tension leading to the capture of the perpetrator. Yet this
book is a page-turner. Tiny, important details of people’s lives
filter through the limpid text as the central plot gradually is pieced
together. All the while each independent speaker keeps an unwavering,
sharp focus on his or her own particular life and set of circumstances.
The fascinating characters appear on the surface to be mysteriously
quiet and unperturbed. Tremblay deftly takes the reader into their
spare, understated psychological interiors: so rural and so …
Canadian. She succeeds in telling a gripping story without undue
fanfare, for any threat of excess emotion is met with the simple need to
return to one’s routine or, at the most, to get out of the car, lean
against a tree, and quietly vomit. No fuss, but every detail
significant.

Lise Tremblay won the 1999 Governor General’s Award for fiction. In
2004, this book (in French titled La Héronniиre) won both the Prix des
Libraires du Québec and the Prix Jean-Hamelin. The translation is by
the award-winning Linda Gaboriau. It is an exquisite rendering of a
quietly prepossessing volume that should be on every book shelf.