Earlier this month I celebrated my birthday and my family
knowing me quite well (you’d hope they would!!) delivered a number of gifts
that were all neatly wrapped and rectangular in shape. They’d been online
shopping choosing a raft of Archipelago Books that weren’t already on my shelf.
Jacques Poulin featured with three gifts so straight into his work I delved. No
logic with the one I chose first, just the one that happened to be closest to
my hand when selecting.
Our protagonist is Teddy, he lives on a deserted island,
alone with his work as a translator of comic strips, his only company a battle
scarred alley cat called Matousalem. Once a week his “boss” from the newspaper
arrives via helicopter with supplies, more comic strips to translate and then
departs with that week’s work. But one week the boss drops off a surprise, a barefoot
girl Marie, “from the back she looked like a boy, because her shoulders were a
little too broad” as well as her cat Moustache.
Teddy divided his time among
translation, keeping an eye on the island and such occupations as building
maintenance and repainting the tennis court. He gave priority, obviously, to
his main job, and he worked to a very precise schedule.
Now, on some days the words
simply didn’t come….He would give up waiting for them; then as he was getting ready
for bed, they would appear, like guests who have forgotten the time. They kept
him awake a good part of the night.
The words whirled around in his
head.
There was a full moon.
This is a novel of simple language and style, reminiscent in
a way of Rodrigo Rey Rosa, where more is said with less.
Ever since the girl had been
there, the island had seemed smaller. You’re more sensitive to the presence of
other people on an island, he mused. Or perhaps other people’s Presence is more
intrusive.
The loneliness and the time spent on Teddy musing about his
simple existence is wonderfully portrayed through the simple style and to the
point prose. We have a detailed chapter of Teddy cooking a pie, it includes the
recipe. A stark reminder that the everyday mundane can actually be a
celebration of existence if you only take the time to think about it.
Another “character” is The Prince, Teddy’s tennis ball
machine, which is put to use to relieve Teddy’s stress and keep his body sharp.
He has “conversations” with his brother (who isn’t there), the memorising word-for-word
large passages of short stories about isolation, a visit at low tide on foot to
another island, where they are met by a silent man with a shotgun. But the
tranquil idyllic scene is broken when one week the boss leaves his wife “Featherhead”
and her Chihuahua, Candy, behind. Given our protagonist is a translator we have
definitions of words throughout (for example “happy”), reading the clinical
explanation denigrating the true meaning:
She started putting the
dictionaries away while he got undressed. As she was closing the big Harrap’s her attention was drawn to the
word “ethereal” at the very bottom of the right-hand page: she couldn’t resist
looking to see how the word was translated; then she turned the page and read
in a low voice: “Au-dessus des choses de
ce monde.” Not of this world.
This simple fable muses on what it is to be a French Canadian,
not French, not American. As time becomes more blurred we find that during each
spring tide, when the moon is full, there is all sorts of rubbish and debris
washed onto the shore. During the spring tides is when a whole lot of other
characters begin to appear; an author who wants the solitude to write “The Author”,
a French professor who is an expert in the history of comic strips “Professor
Moccasin”, and later “The Ordinary Man” who is brought in to restore order to a
populated island. The list continues but to reveal such would mean a spoiler
alert, so you’ll just have to read the book to see how society develops.
As we delve deeper and deeper in what it means to be part of
society our fable begins to blur too, the paths on the island are mapped,
representing the sinuous flow of life in our veins, one character is reduced to
speaking in monkey language from the comic strip Tarzan, time becomes blurred,
it is no longer a reality, merely a concept. And of course, having a writer and
a translator on the island we have musings on writing as art:
“There’s a man walking on the
beach,” she began. “His mind is blank and he has no idea where he’s going. He’s
all alone. Suddenly his foot catches against something. He continues on his
way, then he feels an urge to go back and see what it was. He retraces his
steps. He kicks at the thing, which is almost completely buried in the sand,
and it doesn’t move. It doesn’t seem to be a rock or a piece of wood. He gets
down on his knees and tries to lift it, but he can’t get a grip on it. SO he
puts his nose up to it: it smells strange, an animal smell, it smells of
leather….Intrigued now, he sweeps away the sand and stones with his hands and discovers
that the object resembles a suitcase laid down flat, with one corner sticking
up in the air. He removes some more sand. He uncovers a handle, hinges, straps,
another handle, and now he’s getting excited because it’s not a suitcase after
all, it’s a real chest, lying on its side, a leather chest with a domed lid and
it seems very old because it’s half-rotted by the water. He picks up a pointed
rock so he can dig faster. He’s hurrying because the tide is rising, he’s
working nervously now and images are starting to glow in his mind: gold coins,
diamond rings, old dirks and daggers, diadems, necklaces set with precious
stones, old pirate maps, the images are all jumbled up together and he digs
more and more feverishly, sometimes with the pointed rock, sometimes with his
hands. At last the treasure chest is freed. He grasps one handle and, pulling
with all his might, he manages to move it, then to pull it out of the hole; he
sets it upright on the beach and drags it over to the trees so it will be safe
from the tide. It’s a very old chest: the leather has been eaten away by the
water, all the hinges are covered with rust; there’s no padlock, just an old
lock that’s all rusty too. So then he starts to look for something to help him
force the lock. He looks for an iron rod or a boat nail, anything, perhaps a
nail like the ones they use for fastening down railway ties, but all he can
find is a fence picket with a piece of wire attached to it. He slips the wire
under the clasp and, using the picket as a lever, he taps it. The lock gives
way. Kneeling on the ground, he anxiously raises the lid; heart pounding, he
looks inside: all he can see at the bottom of the chest is some mildewed cloth,
old women’s clothes. Nothing else. And that’s the story about writing.”
Poulin’s world is one I enjoyed very much, a simple place,
with simple language but so many hidden meanings, a meandering journey through existence,
the meaning and joy of solitude, the insanity of society and the joy of
writing. More works by Poulin will be reviewed over the coming weeks.
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