Aurora Montrealis

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

This short-story collection, masterfully translated by Matt Cohen, is as
much about Montreal as it is about francophone Montrealers. Montreal is
portrayed as a truly cosmopolitan city in stories that cut across
linguistic, political, sexual, ethnic, and racial boundaries.

Whatever story Proulx tells—whether he is describing a love affair in
what reads like journal entries that are presented in nonchronological
order, the attraction between a Québécoise and a Toronto anglophone
(two people who are “light-years” apart at the moment of the
referendum), or a professor’s realization that he will never be a
poet—a sense of melancholy and an equally pervasive sense of humor
capture our attention and sustain our fascination.

In “Francophonie,” a story full of irony, a publisher from the
Paris firm Galligrasseuil comes to Montreal to meet Quebec’s fabulous
writers. One of them, the author of a series of essays entitled On All
Fours, Sitting Down, Lying Down and Standing Up, sees Canada as an
“adolescent country where televised sagas are still believed to
constitute the quintessence of literature ... [and] which seems more
terrified of its tiny intellectual elite than of its numerous crapulous
gangsters.” He decides to emigrate to Paris, while the enthusiastic
Frenchman moves to Montreal.

What ultimately holds these stories about Montrealers together is their
characters’ love for their city, their youthful enthusiasm, and the
inevitable disintegration of their passions.