Monsieur Montreal Culture: The Passion of Simon Brault

Not just Monsieur Culture Montréal, in other words, but Monsieur Montreal Culture. Brault wasn’t playing to a particularly mixed crowd. There might have been 300 of us in the audience, and I saw only a couple of other Anglos and one Spaniard; there were undoubtedly other non-Francophones I did not recognize, but there were no Anglophone media other than myself, if I can be counted a journalist. La Presse covered the event, but The Gazette did not. There are times, even today, when Montreal seems to live on one planet in English and on another one in French.

Annie Ernaux: from L’Autre Fille (The Other Daughter)

When French author Annie Ernaux was ten years old, she overheard her mother conversing with a customer outside the family-run small grocery. The mother confided that there was a daughter before Annie, a six-year old girl who contracted diphtheria and who “died like a little saint.” L’Autre fille (The Other Daughter) is Annie Ernaux’s letter to the departed.

      Annie Ernaux  [Photo: Catherine Hélie, Gallimard]

Do Other Canadian Publishers Work in Two Languages? by Linda Leith

This is Part II of a three-part text, The Decision to Publish in French. Part I is here; Part III is here.

Walking Through the Trees, part I, by Kenneth Radu

A garden requires walls, water, and stone.

Xstrata Treetop Walkway, Kew Gardens