Antonine Maillet

Britain occupied the French colony of Acadia (roughly corresponding to the modern Maritime provinces and eastern Maine) during the North American wars of the mid-18th century. We learnt a lot about Wolfe and the Heights of Abraham in our school history, but not so much about the way most of the French settlers in Acadia were forcibly deported around 1755. An estimated 11,500 people — most of them families who had been farming and fishing there for over a century — were displaced to the southern colonies or the Caribbean, and up to half of them are thought to have died by accident, disease or starvation. Many of the survivors ultimately settled in Louisiana, where their descendants turned "Acadian" into "Cajun".

Others found their way back to Canada "by the back door", and it's this return from exile, the foundation of the present-day French-speaking communities in places like New Brunswick, that Maillet documents in her famous novel, which won her the Prix Goncourt in 1979.

The Acadian widow Pélagie has worked for fifteen years in Georgia to earn the money she needs to buy a cart and a team of oxen to take her family back to the North. They face endless difficulties during what turns into a ten-year journey, picking up numerous other exiled Acadians as they go, and Pélagie becomes a kind of Moses leading her people to the promised land.

Maillet gives the story a deliberately epic quality, rooted in an oral tradition, by reporting it to us as told around the hearth by people three generations after Pélagie and her companions, traditional storytellers who are Maillet's own direct ancestors. Pélagie's companions are straight out of the quest-story tradition: the wise old storyteller, the traditional healer/midwife, the intrepid young hero, the fey young girl, the (ghostly?) sea captain who turns up in moments of crisis, the giant (Rabelais is constantly hovering around in the background, not surprising given that many of the Acadians came from Poitou in the early 17th century), etc. But they are never just stock types: in their truculent arguments and witty dialogue, they come over as fresh and very individual, as does Pélagie with her mix of spiritual leader, Mother Courage and all-too-human middle-aged woman.

All the dialogue is in Acadian dialect, with the third-person narration in slightly more standard French, but still making extensive use of local words. It's intelligible with some lateral thinking, particularly if you've read Rabelais, but it's a bit of a shock at first. It took me a while to work out that Acadians use "je" for the first person plural pronoun as well as for the singular, for instance. And the dialect is clearly a large part of the book's character and one of the reasons for its obvious classic status in Canada. Quite a tour-de-force, anyway!… (mehr)

This is a srange little book that I found difficult to get into but which eventually did grab my interest. Don L'Orignal is a barbaric man who is king of a mysterious floating island of grass and fleas. The "Fleas" are starving and decide to steal a barrel of molasses from the mainlanders which sets off a series of confrontations. One of the sub plots concerns the love Citrouille has for the daughter of a mainlander. Twice they run away together but are foiled. The last attempt leads to the destruction of Flea Island.… (mehr)