Rue St Denis: Fantastic Tales

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.

Rue St Denis is a delightful book. Originally published in 1978 under
the title Rue Saint Denis, it takes us to this famous street, the main
artery of Montreal’s Quartier latin, where students, writers, and
artists eat and drink and linger. André Carpentier, writes Michel Lord
in the introduction, gave impetus to the current vogue of the short
story in Quebec; he also co-edited Parallel Voices/Voix parallиles with
the late Matt Cohen.

The book contains nine stories. “Perrine Blanc’s Seven Dreams and
Reality” is an ironic tale of a woman who through dream analysis will
separate from the charlatan-analyst with whom she is living. In “The
Between-Time Bookshop,” Luc, a well-known young writer and
historiographer starts to confuse present and past. How does this
happen? Through “unbridled will of History … disappointments of his
own time … the methodical vagaries of his madness? Peu importe.” Luc
dreams of an ancestor who resembles Jules Verne and writes wisely about
things that will happen a century later. The protagonist, Michel Lord
explains, “is unconsciously in search of a Minotaur who is no one
other than himself.”

Unfortunately, there are problems with the dust jacket. The back flap
manages to introduce several grammatical mistakes into its list of other
titles published by Carpentier. The front flap would have us believe
that in Montreal cafés people “dip a croque-monsieur into their
coffee” A croque-monsieur is made of bread, cheese, and ham—no
Frenchman would dip such a thing into his espresso! This splendid,
finely translated work deserved better.