Un roman grec by Lucie Ledoux

Abstract

que le classique par lequel il dit avoir été inspiré. Blériot et Nora sont à des annéeslumi ère des attachants Manon Lescaut et Chevalier Des Grieux. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Boškovic LEDOUX, LUCIE. Un roman grec. Montréal: Triptyque, 2010. ISBN 978-2-89031-696-6. Pp. 106. $17 Can. The title itself undergoes the most obvious of several major transformations that take place in Lucie Ledoux’s compelling first novel. The story begins in the Montreal neighborhood of Parc-Extension, where young Lucie Labonté lives with her four sisters and their parents. She goes to school, walks to the dépanneur and to the neighborhood’s ethnic bakeries, sleeps over at friends’ houses and explores Montreal with her taxi-driving dad. Parc-Extension is still immigrant-rich, the adult narrator reminds us, although it is now heavily Pakistani, Indian, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi. However, in the 1960s and 1970s, the neighborhood is predominantly Greek: Lucie enjoys baklava as thoroughly as her own mother’s homemade fruit pies and appears at home using basic Greek expressions outside her house. But she also understands that she is different. “Naître à ParcExtension dans les années soixante oblige une petite Québécoise à un drôle d’apprentissage ,” she writes, “elle doit faire la surprenante expérience d’être étrangère dans son propre pays”(14). Following a fairly standard roman d’apprentissage format, the novel soon begins hinting at, then careens directly into tragedy. Little Lucie accidently gives her Greek playmate Mary a concussion when playing on the sidewalk, then avoids her thereafter, even though both girls continue to live in the neighborhood. The narrator wraps up the incident darkly, noting that “[j]’allais vivre là un traumatisme si grand que je le porterais en moi pendant trente ans” (18). We learn that Lucie’s father “entrait parfois dans des colères aussi brusques que foudroyantes” (26–27) and that the girls and their mother must often, inexplicably, spend the night at their unpleasant grandmother ’s house; Lucie loves school but is picked on and not particularly gifted in her studies; as a child she has almost died of meningitis and, feeling much closer to her dad, blames her mother for the near-fatal event: “Je pensais confusément que c’était ma mère qui m’avait transmis le virus mortel quand j’étais dans son ventre et qu’elle m’avait nourrie avec son sang contaminé” (36). Distant and quiet, her mother periodically visits Montreal’s Hôtel-Dieu hospital, whose name allows young Lucie to believe it is an actual hotel. Finally, young Lucie realizes her mother is dying of cancer. The title is thus transformed—from a simple geography into a clever threeword allusion to both a contemporary literary genre and an ancient one: tragedy. The second half of this short novel chronicles Lucie’s mother’s death, moving eloquently between a chronology of her mother’s decline and Lucie’s own devastation , throughout the illness and well into adulthood. As a novel (or, at 106 pages, arguably a novella), Un roman grec delivers the features one expects from a contemporary novel about coming to terms with childhood tragedy and is thus precisely what its title says it will be. Ledoux’s first-person style achieves a certain power, in spite of the many risks inherent in memoir-like autofiction projects. The novel is not without flaws, of course. Occasional forays into metaphor often 598 FRENCH REVIEW 85.3 work, as in a passage where Lucie views her mother’s cancer with childlike jealousy : “[l]a maladie est sa plus tendre amie [...] ma rivale” (70). At times, though, Ledoux delves so deeply into the narrator’s grief that she dwells on details many readers will not find all that significant—like the fact that her mother’s name, Lise, is a subjunctive form of the verb lire, “une action envisagée,” whereas her own nickname, Lu, is a past participle, “un mode dit impersonnel” (90). This connection is not particularly developed. Nor is the sudden appearance, in the novel’s penultimate chapter, of a tripartite, sub-section-like structure, whose parts are...