Bambi and Me

Ian C. Nelson is assistant director of libraries at the University of
Saskatchewan, and président de la Troupe du Jour, Regina Summer Stage.

Winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation from French
into English, Bambi and Me uses the author’s lifelong fascination with
the movies to take us through his childhood and up to his first attempt
at serious writing.

Most of the initial chapters centre on his experience of a variety of
films: Disney animated features, black- and-white slapstick comedies,
1950s horror films, classic French cinema, Québécois features, and
CinemaScope musicals, among others. In addition to providing us with
tart observations about cinema, acting styles, and dramatic language
over the years, Tremblay reveals his family background and his personal
experience of French-English relations in a changing Montreal.

Tremblay’s novels, stories, and plays introduced us to women who
shared his mother’s “strong tendency towards exaltation.” In Bambi
and Me, he allows us to hear his father and brothers, his girl cousins
and specific aunts, and household exchanges bearing the seeds of
dialogue that were to grow into Les Belles-Soeurs and Surprise!
Surprise! With a mature writer’s sureness of touch, Tremblay explores
the wondrous discoveries and revelations of the boy, Michel.

A short novel written in 1959 forms the concluding chapter. No Honour
Among Thieves (also translated by Fischman) is an opening declaration of
Tremblay both as a writer and as a man acknowledging his own sexuality;
it is clumsy, tentative, and achingly sincere.