A Drifting Year

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Before becoming a novelist, Dany Laferriиre worked as a journalist in
his native Haiti until, after a colleague was murdered, he decided to
emigrate to Montreal at the age of 22. (The text indicates that this
event occurred in 1976, at the time of the PQ election, though the
dust-jacket information twice refers to 1978.) A Drifting Year, first
published in Montreal as Chronique de la dérive douce in 1994, is a
creative, autobiographical account of the hardships and deprivations of
his first year as an immigrant. It reads as a Haitian/Canadian
“portrait of the artist as a young man.”

Such memoirs are common enough, but this one is unusual for being
written not as a continuous prose narrative but as a series of linked
but fragmented free-verse vignettes. Each section exists as a separate
entity, though a number of characters recur again and again. These
include “the Indian,” “the boss’s secretary,” “the old man
on the fifth floor,” “the fat lady in the laundromat,” a
succession of girls (my one criticism is that the
making-love-to-all-girls-in-sight routine gets a bit monotonous), and
even a lodging-room mouse. Remarkably, though he experiences all kinds
of frustration and injustice, the tone is rarely bitter. More often,
Laferriиre writes with a wistful, almost whimsical (though pointed),
humor that is entirely his own and highly refreshing.

Translation is rather like stage carpentry: the best work is likely to
pass unnoticed. All that I need say about David Homel’s rendering is
that one never recognizes it as a translation. There can be no higher
praise. A Drifting Year is an endearing, compulsively readable book that
deserves a wide audience.