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Jimmy Beaulieu's Bikini

Here's a review I wrote for the Summer 2014 issue of the Montreal Review of Books. Because the following graphic novel was pretty slim, I spent some time at the public library reading other works by Jimmy Beaulieu. He definitely dares to be an innovator, and I'm sure that there are people "borrowing" some of his unique ideas. I particularly enjoyed his take on body image, both male and female.  

My Neighbour’s Bikini
Jimmy Beaulieu
Conundrum Press

Jimmy Beaulieu is a creative force in the French-speaking graphic novel milieu. The cartoonist has published 16 books in the past 14 years, in addition to working as the publisher at Mécanique Générale and starting his own small-print press Colosse. In 2010, English Canada was finally able to see some of Beaulieu’s work with the release of Suddenly Something Happened. It was the story of Beaulieu’s life, his childhood growing up among a huge extended family on Île d’Orléans, his parents’ separation, his years of singledom in the Métropole, and finally life with his girlfriend in Montreal’s Rosemont. Suddenly Something Happened showcased Beaulieu’s significant skill as a graphic artist and his wonderful sense of humour. However, it failed to show another aspect of the cartoonist’s considerable talent, something that is fortunately in My Neighbour's Bikini.

Originally published in French in 2006, My Neighbour’s Bikini is the story of two shy neighbours living on the Plateau who meet on a sweltering summer day when everything grinds to a halt because of a power blackout. Simon introduces himself to his neighbour Bernadette on a downtown street, and after they walk home together, Bernadette invites Simon to go for a swim at the neighbourhood pool. The chance meeting has an authentic cringeworthy feel to it, mainly because of the realistic dialogue, and this short tale offers a very accurate depiction of Montreal. However, at first glance, the story has some sizable shortcomings. I initially thought that the problem might be the translation, but upon closer examination I realized that there was a problem with the story’s flow.

In a graphic novel the reader has to be able to readily understand the relationship between two consecutive panels, through visual or textual clues. However, in my first reading of My Neighbour’s Bikini, this relationship between panels was not always clear. Two vignettes have been inserted into the storyline that have zero or little impact on the outcome of the narrative. In the first instance, Bernadette and Simon’s conversation is interrupted by a sequence with a young man cycling on the Mont-Royal. In the second, the story jumps abruptly from Bernadette and Simon walking home to two women in an apartment sharing an intimate moment. One of these women, who the reader later meets at the pool, is Bernadette’s neighbour. While these two vignettes were initially confusing, they do add some atmospheric detail to the story, lending it an overall dreamlike quality. Introducing vignettes into the traditional storyline, I discovered, was a recurring pattern in Beaulieu’s other work. This is especially true in À la faveur de la nuit, a humourous tale about two women telling each other stories late into the night.

Another recurring feature in Jimmy Beaulieu’s work that was non-existent in Suddenly Something Happens is nudity, which is tastefully presented and never gratuitous in My Neighbour’s Bikini. Beaulieu has considerable talent at drawing nudes, and the author should be given credit for presenting natural-looking full-hipped women rather than the standard waif variety. In the past, he has presented work with frontal nudes of men, which was the subject of complaints at the Quai des Bulles Festival in St Malo, France. Naked women were apparently fine, but a naked man in an intimate moment was apparently offensive….

I must admit that I was initially puzzled by the publisher’s choice to translate a book that was first released in French eight years ago. Obviously, it did not reflect how far the author has come since then. But My Neighbour’s Bikini, although not Beaulieu’s best, is tamer than some of his other work, and it may be a way to test the waters to see how English speakers will react to his more audacious content. Overall, once I accepted his non-traditional storyline, I enjoyed the oneiric quality of his work, and of course, I liked that his characters, both male and female, looked like everyday people, a refreshing and welcome change.

Other book-related reviews
Lily and Taylor by Elise Moser
World of Glass by Jocelyne Dubois
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Letting It Go by Miriam Katin
My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Me by Gina Roitman
Stony River by Tricia Dower
Susceptible by Geneviève Castrée
Studio Saint-Ex by Ania Szado
Bombay Wali and other stories by Veena Gokhale
The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier
Gay Dwarves of America by Anne Fleming



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Interview w/ Heather O'Neill, author of The Girl Who Was Saturday Night


Here's an interview I did with Heather O'Neill last May. I made the fatal error of not writing it up and pitching it immediately. Instead, I pushed headlong into planning our summer holidays in the UK and registering my two children for day camp. When I came up for air, I noticed that every conceivable media outlet in Montreal had interviewed the author, so I decided wait for a lazy day, like today, to post it.

It’s been seven long years since the release of Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals, the gritty tale of Baby, a motherless child raised on Ste-Catherine Street by her drug-addicted father. The book went on to become an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Orange Prize and long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin International Literary Award. This is indeed impressive for a first novel. But that unexpected success put considerable pressure on the author to come up with an equally as good follow-up, and according to the author, this was not easy.

“The idea for The Girl Who Was Saturday Night came very slowly,” said O’Neill at our interview, one of many she would give that day.

According to O’Neill, the pressure came mainly from herself. “I’d start something and then ask myself how it would be received in say, South Africa. There was this idea that I had to please, something I didn’t feel with my first book. ” She added that her brother-in-law had once referred to her distracted stare as second bookitis.

Although the idea came to her like a coffee-machine set to slow drip, there are some undeniable commonalities between Lullabies for Little Criminals and The Girl Who Was Saturday Night. Baby, like the twin protagonists Nouschka and Nicolas, basically raise themselves in the same sordid area of Montreal, clinging to each other for comfort as parentless children often do. O’Neill described the twins as “enmeshed.”In the story, they often feel like a single character with Nicholas embodying the dark side and Nouschka the light. However at age 20, Nouschka begins to forge her own path away from her brother, just as in the backdrop, Quebec is moving away from Canada.

“I chose to set the story in the period leading up to the 1995 Referendum to emphasize the theme of separation, both for the twins and Canada.”

Another commonality between the two novels is the less than ideal paternal figure. The twin’s father, the top-hat wearing Etienne Tremblay, is a washed up 70s folk singer with a criminal past. He is self-obsessed and uses his cute little twins as props, a means to garner more of the public’s attention. As I read the story, I tried to think of whom the character might be based on, and Jean Le Loup immediately came to mind. “Yes, he definitely wore a top hat,” said O’Neill. “I do have an unrequited love for Jean Le Loup, but he’s the wrong period.” Etienne was in fact a composite character based on many Quebec folk singers and performers, such as Gilles Vigneault, Robert Charlebois, Leonard Cohen and Claude Dubois. However, O’Neill emphasized that she drew on their very best, charismatic sides. After all, Etienne has some unsavoury proclivities.

But is The Girl Who Was Saturday Night a condemnation of celebrity? According to O’Neill it isn’t. Instead, she was interested in what it would be like to be a star or the child of a star growing up in Montreal.

“The Quebec star system has always been of great interest to me, and it’s funny that so few people outside of Quebec actually know it exists,” said O’Neill. Apparently, her US publisher needed to get the rights to the work of a Quebec artist that O’Neill had used in her previous novel. The publisher was incensed that she had to jump through so many hoops for the rights to something from a forgotten folksinger. The artist in question was Félix Leclerc. . . .

Overall, O’Neill’s latest novel is fun-loving with plenty of highly visual metaphors and simile. The author confessed that she did “have a soft spot for similes.” To give you an example of their visual quality, here is one my favourites: “When he exhaled, the cigarette smoke looked like a girl doing rhythmic gymnastics with a ribbon.” In fact, there were many scenes in Girl that I could easily see in another short animation like Claire Blanchet’s adaptation of O’Neill’s short story “The End of Pinky," which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last September.

This book will be a hit with many young readers, or any reader for that matter who enjoys living vicariously through ingénues who chase bad-boys for some intense short-term pleasure, even when it means long-term pain. The Girl Who Was Saturday Night serves up a whimsical, sensual adventure through Montreal's dark side, complete with criminals, bikers and brilliant psychiatric patients–a great escape for a hot August day.




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2014: So Many Good Books So Little Time

Photo credit: ProfDEH Wikimedia Commons
I felt a little overwhelmed when I read the National Post's 25 of the most anticipated books of 2014. Not only did it list the Literary Editor's picks, it also listed many other books that would be released this year. And truth be told, it is going to be a stellar year for books, even better than last year. I immediately spotted five that I was dying to get my hands on. Here they are:

Stone Mattress, by Margaret Atwood, publisher and release date to be announced
Last year was a great year for short fiction with Alice Munro's Nobel Prize. As a lover of short fiction, I'm looking forward to Margaret Atwood's Stone Mattress collection. After seeing her and Sheila Heti at the Drawn and Quarterly-sponsored event in early December, I remembered how much I enjoyed Surfacing in my final year of high school. I went on to read everything available by Atwood at the time, but I haven't read anything by her recently. Seeing the witty literary giant on stage reignited my interest in her work. What will a master storyteller's short fiction be like? I can't wait to see.

Ellen in Pieces, by Caroline Adderson, HarperCollins, September
Canadian novelist and short story writer, Caroline Adderson is a gifted writer. Although well-known among avid readers and Canadian literary circles, she has not yet made that break into the mainstream. Ellen in Pieces is a collection of connected short stories that centers around the life of Ellen, a young Vancouver woman stricken with cancer but who still has a healthy sexual appetite. It contains a story entitled "Erection Man," which was long-listed for the world's richest (£30,000) short story prize, Britain's Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. Let's hope this book brings Adderson the recognition she deserves.

Margaret Atwood and Sheila Heti at D&Q event
Boy, Snow, Bird, by Helen Oyeyemi, Penguin Canada, March  
Boy, Snow, Bird is Oyeyemi's fifth novel, the first of which she wrote while writing her final high school exams. The Cambridge graduate has also published two plays. Not bad for someone who is not yet 30. In 1953, Boy Novak, a woman obsessed with beauty, leaves New York to live in a small Massachusetts town where she marries a widower and becomes the stepmother to the gorgeous Snow Whitman. When Boy gives birth to dark-skinned child, she discovers that the Whitmans are light-skinned African Americans passing for white. It will be interesting to see how Oyeyemi treats the cultural constructs of race and beauty in the Pre-Civil Rights era New England, more than 30 years before the Nigerian-born, London-based author was born.

The Girl That Was Saturday Night, by Heather O'Neill, HarperCollins, May
Here is the long-awaited follow-up to O'Neill's 2007 international bestseller Lullabies for Little Criminals. This time, O'Neill tackles celebrity. Noushcka and Nicolas Tremblay are beautiful twins who live in a sordid apartment on St-Laurent Boulevard with their grandfather. As the offspring of famous bon vivant folksinger Étienne Tremblay, the inseparable twins are media darlings as children. However, their self-destructive behaviour on the eve of their 20th birthday attracts the attention of a journalist who unearths some disquieting secrets. It has been said that this book is classic, unforgettable Heather O'Neill.

The Fledglings, by David Homel, Cormorant Books, April
The Fledglings is award-winning translator David Homel's seventh novel. It is about the daughter of a Jewish bootlegger in Prohibition-era Chicago. What could be more interesting than a tale set in the days of Al Capone, particularly when it is written by a native Chicagoan? What might be even more interesting is to see how convincingly Homel writes from the point of view of a woman protagonist.

Other book-related reviews
Lily and Taylor by Elise Moser
World of Glass by Jocelyne Dubois
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Letting It Go by Miriam Katin
My Mother, the Nazi Midwife and Me by Gina Roitman
Stony River by Tricia Dower
Susceptible by Geneviève Castrée
Studio Saint-Ex by Ania Szado
Bombay Wali and other stories by Veena Gokhale
The Last Runaway by Tracy Chevalier
Gay Dwarves of America by Anne Fleming





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My Prairie Home by Chelsea McMullan

The only Canadian feature film in the official selection of this year's Sundance Film Festival, My Prairie Home was enthusiastically received in Park City, Utah. In the 77-minute NFB documentary, filmmaker Chelsea McMullan follows Montreal-based indie singer Rae Spoon across Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba in a Greyhound bus. But this is not your standard music documentary of a road trip. As we travel the highway across the endless prairie, we learn about the hills and valleys of Rae Spoon's early life.

The indie singer was raised in an evangelical Christian family under a tyrannical father, a church deacon of questionable mental health. Early on Spoon sought refuge in music to avoid her parents' continual sightings of signs of the Rapture. Life was already difficult enough for Spoon who couldn't see herself as a wife and mother, answering to a husband. In fact, a husband was almost unfathomable. Spoon is gay and describes herself as gender neutral, using the personal pronoun "they" in self-reference. As can be expected, high school was not easy, nor was coming out. In a soft-spoken manner, Spoon relates standing up to family, community and high school bullies, but the prairies remain an integral part of Spoon's identity and the place the singer still calls home.

Besides the stunning shots of the Canadian prairie, the viewer is treated to Spoon's hauntingly beautiful singing voice. For anyone who has driven across Canada, the prairie provinces seem endless. But there is a magical beauty to the golden velour-textured wheat fields and that great big prairie sky. My Prairie Home is a moving coming-of-age film that may be instrumental in challenging many preconceived notions about the transgendered.

If you missed the film at the Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal the NFB is screening it free online for 48 hours (January 26 and 27). To view the film on the NFB site click here.

Other film reviews
The Missing Picture by Rithy Panh
Detropia by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady
Finding Dawn by Christine Welch
The Fruit Hunters by Yung Chang


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To Patch or Not To Patch

Amid frigid temperatures last week, I found myself on St-Hubert Street, north of Jean-Talon, trying to find of all things, iron on-patches. And with all the fabric stores and sewing accessory shops you'd think that it would have been easy. But I was directed and redirected to a number of stores before I finally found what I was looking for. It would appear that people don't patch anymore.

My son, Sacha, now six years old won't stop growing. I bought him two pairs of jeans in September, and they're already too small. This winter, he's been wearing navy blue hand-me-down snow pants, the ones his sister wore 5 years ago. But because he likes to rough-house, there are holes in the knees. I could go out and buy him a new pair, but these snow pants still fit him.

To patch or not to patch? This is a makeshift solution, not altogether aesthetically pleasing, but an attempt to salvage rather than discard. This wasn't a protest against the flood of cheap Chinese imports as some of you might imagine. Instead, this was brought about by pure nostalgia. I wanted to see the steps my mom, a single mother, had gone through to patch clothes.

When I found the patches I was looking for, "Made in Canada" was printed on the label, something I have not seen in years. Factoring in the dust and the metal hook I found the patches on, I guessed that they might be decades old, possibly hanging in that exact same place.

Now some of you will smile at my attempt to iron patches on snow pants because, as I soon discovered after reading the patch instructions, you can't iron rayon. It melts. But now I was determined to find a way to do it.

While in Accessoires de Couture St-Hubert, I was also relieved to find "Made in Canada" cotton socks. Although much more expensive than their "Made in China" counterparts, they come with the added bonus that they don't strangle your ankles. But don`t talk to me about the Chinese-sizing conundrum. In November, I spent an hour in a department store trying to find winter boots for my daughter, but nothing fit her size-5 foot, except a size-7 boot. But I digress...

The new cotton socks were placed around the edges of the patch so the hot iron would not come into contact with the rayon snow pants. The sock solution was my contribution to the iron-on patch effort. My more patient husband volunteered to do the ironing portion. To some, it would appear that he had hijacked my pious effort to revisit my late mother's memory, but in fact his help was greatly appreciated. We could share the blame if it all went south.

I was able to revisit my late-mother's memory vicariously through my husband's ironing. It all came rushing back to me, leaving me to wonder why I'd wanted to stroll down memory lane in the first place.

I suddenly remembered her saying "Shit!" as she ironed on patches because there was never enough glue on the edges for them to stick properly. But my more virtuous husband just pressed his lips together and then calmly said, "The patch edges aren't sticking." Then I remember my mother grumbling, "God damn it! Now I'm going to have to stitch around those useless patches!" This involved more work and created another problem. My mother was a perfectionist, particularly when it came to sewing, and the strongest hand-sewn stitches would show, a major sewing faux pas, the mark of an amateur.

My husband did suggest using the sewing machine to sew down the edges, but I told him that the pants were too thick for a sewing machine needle. "I'll sew around the edges," he offered. I cringed. I watched him do a whip stitch around the edges, the weakest and most obvious stitch, but at least he tried to match the colour of the thread.

In the end, my son's snow pants looked only marginally better than when they were ripped. As can be expected, after a few falls, the whip stitch came apart. But overall the patches are still intact, and the pants should last the entire winter. Every time I see his snow pants I laugh, and I'm sure my mother would have laughed too.


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