Parallel to Life: A Notebook

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 finely translated collection of a writer’s thoughts on life
belongs in the French tradition of moralists such as Montaigne and
Pascal. It is a tradition, notes translator Daniel Sloate, that “has
never caught on in English letters; the closest relative would be E.M.
Forster or Virginia Woolf, although Roy’s notes are in much more
succinct form.”

Any writer, whether established or aspiring, will find much of interest
in Roy’s notes. Organized under 18 headings, they concentrate on the
writer, the writer’s craft, and the writer’s passion for the written
word. “[A]s a writer I enjoy the privilege of being able to stick my
nose into everything,” Roy confides. It is this personal tone that
makes his book so appealing.