I have become quite the fan of Poulin over the last couple of years. Wild Cat is the fourth of his that I’ve read and, for my part, the first to have a misstep, even if only a slight one.

The book is written with that same calm and intimacy, and the same spare writing style, that I found so attractive in his other works. And, I found myself warming to the characters just as quickly: Jack, the professional scribe who writes CVs, stock correspondence and the occasional love letter for those too busy or unable to write; Kim, the therapist and lover who lives upstairs.

The story, itself, was rather diffuse and amorphous, much like the fog images that occur often in the novel. The plot is rather sparse, almost comprising a series of vignettes rather than an arc moving from Point A to Point B, and every relationship in the book is defined in only the sketchiest of terms, with large holes in our understanding. What emerges struck me as a meditation on death and the human need to control or come to terms with mortality. It was if Poulin wanted to leave the reader with a thought and feeling rather than a story.

However, this vagueness went a bit too far for me in the relationship between Jack and Kim: the word that keeps coming to mind is unfounded. Poulin portrays a bond that is deep and loving and yet, perhaps—we are never certain—she has casual relationships with other men. As she becomes more expressive of her affection for Jack and widens their intimacy toward a family, he comes to the realization that he has lost her. While these contradictions do serve to heighten the feelings of loss and uncertainty that surround the topic of death, it didn’t strike me as a natural exposition but more as a forced technique that left me unsettled and focused on the fact that it felt wrong rather than the story the contained it.

As always, Sheila Fischman’s translation reads beautifully.

In the balance, it’s a book that I don’t hesitate to recommend. Poulin’s deceptively simple style continues to evoke thought and emotion that will remain even after the details of the plot have faded. However, it isn’t my favorite of his books. ( )

A French-Canadian author who apparently has published a number of books, but to whom I was introduced through a favourable review of his latest. This is not it, but I thought I would sample him in paperback before thinking of the current release hardcover.

Poulin has a very minimalist style of writing. His protagonist (who is a professional writer of Cvs, love letters, sometime editor) speaks warmly of Hemingway (and I think reflects the author's own feelings) as someone he reads, "often for the vigour and restraint of his writing". He also speaks well of Richard Ford, Modiano, Carver, Garbrielle Roy, Emmanuel Bove, Rilke, Brautigan, Chandler and others who, "had a common way of writing that was both simple and harmonious." So, the writing is direct and pleasant, but I thought the plot lines needed a little more focus, or maybe their vagueness and incompleteness were intended.

The protagonist lives in a building with Kim, good friend and sometimes lover, who is a therapist who has moved on from Jung to some sort of mind and body approach that has her seeing clients at all hours of the night, and which leads, in one instance to her being beaten by a client with whom she went to a lakeside cottage; nothing more is made of this incident. The writer becomes obsessed with an Old Man who comes to see him to write a love letter to his wife; obsessed in the sense that he finds out the Old Man's name, where he lives, and follows him to try to learn more about him (the Old Man drives a caleche in Quebec City; the whole novel is set in Quebec City, particularly the old part of the city). There is also Macha, a young girl who seems to have some sort of relationship with the Old Man, though it is never made clear what it is exactly. And the Old Man simply disappears from the story and the writer's life after one evening when the latter follows the former around a fog-enshrouded Quebec City, and sees the Old Man contemplating, then rejecting suicide in the harbour; the writer comes to the realization that the love letters to his "wife" were in fact letters to death which was, for him, "an attractive and dangerous woman". Macha and Kim come together at the end, as surrogate mother and daughter, but this moves the writer out of the picture and the novel ends with him packing his suitcase to leave.