Jacques Poulin: Le Chat sauvage (1998)

Things seem to be in their place in this ninth novel of Jacques Poulin's: it's set in Vieux-Québec, a cat on the cover, there's a writer (albeit for other people) called Jack who has a (this time relatively new) Volskwagen minibus, there's a mysterious young girl, and there's a search. Hemingway's mentioned of course, although I started to wonder if the title 'the Modiano of Québec city' isn't appropriate for Poulin, although I think he'd have to make a much better effort than with this part-detective story to earn such a title.

Jack lives with Kim although she needs she own space, and they're well both beyond their youth but their ages are only vaguely hinted at. Jack is an 'écrivain public', or public letter-writer, which means he writes people's CVs, speeches, even love letters, etc; and Kim is a kind of psychotherapist who sees clients at all times of the day.

The story proper begins when a Vieil Homme – an Old Man whose name is Sam Miller, although it's hardly used at all – visits Jack because he wants to write to his estranged wife to get her to come back to him. Jack and Kim's cat interrupts the proceedings and the man leaves without further ado.

But Jack's curiosity is aroused, and he stalks down the identity of the man, discovering his name, address, and that he's a calèche driver, showing tourists and lovers round Vieux-Québec. The man returns several times and Jack writes him a few letters, and the man says his wife has replied to the second letter, saying she'll return at some unspecified date in the future. The man refuses to let Jack send the letter to the woman's address.

After one visit Jack follows the man, who meets Macha, a young girl sleeping rough who Jack's had a few brushes with, and who is a keen reader – a little like la Grande Sauterelle in Volkswagen Blues, who also has a way of procuring books without paying. It's le Vieil Homme's son's partner who calls Macha a 'wild cat'.

Eventually, Jack realises that the man's wife doesn't exist, and that the letters are in fact addressed to death, which the Vieil Homme thinks about a lot.

And as for Macha – well, she fascinates Kim, who goes away with her for several days and comes back and snuggles up in bed with Macha, who now seems more like a tame kitten than a wild cat. This, Jack feels, just means he has to pack his suitcase in preparation to leave.

It seems an odd end to the book, almost as if Poulin couldn't decide how to conclude it in a satisfactory manner, but odder still is that I can see no clearing up of the relationship between le Vieil Homme and Macha: what exactly did they have to do with each other? And how were we expected to believe that the man's 'wife' wouldn't have recognised that the letters were in a different person's hand? I'm pleased that this isn't the first Jacques Poulin book I've read, as I think I'd have been disinclined to read any more of them.

Jacques Poulin: Le Vieux Chagrin (1989)

Le Vieux Chagrin (VC) being a novel by Jacques Poulin, there are a number of prominent similarities between Volkswagen Blues (VB) and Tournée d'automne (TA), the other books of his I've read: a forty-year-old writer who drives a Volkswagen (Jack in VB and – as a minor character – Jack in TA); Ernest Hemingway (VB and to a lesser extent TA); cats (VB and TA), the past (VB and TA); search (VB), etc.

The principal cat in Le Vieux Chagrin is the narrator's pet Chagrin, the Mr. Blue of the eponymous translation title, who frequently appears in the book (sometimes with other cats), but has no part in the central story.

The narrator is staying in his childhood home by the Saint-Laurent river and becomes interested, to the point of obsession, in a woman on the coast who has arrived in a sailing boat and seems to be partly dwelling in a nearby cave, where she is reading One Thousand and One Nights and has insccribed the name 'Marie K' on the flyleaf, leading the narrator (occasionally called Jim) to call her Marika.

Leaving messages for the woman to call on him brings the character Bungalow into the story, although she has no information about her: Bungalow has left her husband to set up a kind of refuge for women in nearby Québec city. Through Bungalow the teenaged la Petite, a victim of (unstated) abuse by her step-father, comes into the story, and she often stays at Jim's house, loving the cats and other animals that frequent the area.

The writer's main influence is Hemingway, although he's suffering from writer's block with his love story: he incorporates (by factual distortion) people he's known in his life into the story, although he feels that he hasn't loved anyone, including the wife he's divorced from.

Jim comes to realise, or at least to imagine, that he's in love with Marika and decides to visit the cave again. But the sailing boat has gone, her possessions (including the book) have gone, and he knows he will never see her again. In fact, he seriously wonders if she ever existed, and wonders if she wasn't simply a projection of his female self.

This relates to the narrator (a former teacher) speaking to la Petite about Hemingway's story title 'Big Two-Hearted River', and he asks her what 'two-hearted' can mean. As an example, she tells her a story from A. E. Hotchner's Papa Hemingway: A Personal Memoir (1955), in which Hemingway told of a white owl he shot, but which only had a wounded wing: he nursed the animal, fed it, brought it back to health and tamed and befriended it. From this story, la Petite comes to see the masculine and the feminine sides of Hemingway.

The narrator towards the end states that he has never mentioned to anyone his 'naive ambition', his 'enormous and ridiculous' secret of creating through literature a new world without war or other violence, no competition or hostility to others, everything working towards the service of love. Well, I can understand why he keeps his vision a secret, but at least his actions show his intentions, and his last action of adopting la Petite (whose search for her parents has been somewhat negative) is evidence of it: it's not official, he just writes it, signs it and puts it in an envelope. La Petite seals it and stores it away, watched both by the emotionally moved man – and the cats.

Jacques Poulin: La Tournée d'automne | Autumn Rounds (1993)

In Tiphaine Samoyault's article 'Référence et post-modernité : Jacques Poulin' (Littérature 113 (March 1999), pp. 15–23), she draws attention to an interesting idea that la Grande Sauterelle has in Volkswagen Blues: that a book is never complete in itself, that it has to be seen in relation to other books, and not only those by the same author. What is generally believed to be a book is frequently in reality merely part of a vast picture that others have worked on without knowing.

And not only books may be involved in the bigger picture. Samoyault is interested in intertextuality, and in Volkswagen Blues finds references to forty-four books, two films, three maps, three paintings, nine songs and six newspapers. And the references continue in Poulin's La Tournée d'automne: forty books, fourteen songs, one film, one newspaper and a radio programme.

Culture is very important in La Tournée d'automne, as it provides the glue that brings together the Québécois mobile library employee le Chauffeur (who is never named) and Marie, who has come to Québec city on a temporary basis with a group of travelling entertainers. Le Chauffeur and Marie are both (to take the cue from the book title) in the autumn of their life, both unattached, in need of a soulmate and – probably most important of all – both are in love with books, for which they share much the same tastes.

Le Chauffeur lives in Vieux-Québec near Château Frontenac, and in fact meets Marie as she stands one evening by a railing near the castle by the funicular entrance. He returns to see her with the troupe and talks and walks with her, becoming quietly obsessed with her, as she is with him. One night when they can't sleep he takes her for a ride in his bibliobus over the bridge to and around l'Île d'Orléans, where, as Marie remarks, Félix Leclerc used to live.

And later, when le Chauffeur has to do his summer round of the Côte-Nord, the entertainers decide to follow his route in an old school bus, stopping off at various points to entertain the inhabitants of villages and small towns, making good takings. It's an opportunity for two (very subtly) budding lovers to meet and talk and discover how very similar they are in cultural tastes, even how they use the same words and expressions. (Although, right up to the end, they continue – like Jack and la Grande Sauterelle – to address each other by the polite, rather distancing form of 'vous'.)

And as with Volkswagen Blues, this is very much a road novel: detailed observations are made about the itinerary, the various stops made along the Côte-Nord, and then – when Marie leaves the entertainers to fly back to France, le Chauffeur taking her to the airport, the novel details the continued journey and considerable detour le Chauffeur takes (during which the relationship is finally consummated) as they drive to Godbout, take the ferry to Matane, and go around the head of the Gaspésie peninsula. For a person unfamiliar with the route taken, I'd advise that this delightful book be read with a map to trace it.

But rather than Montréal airport it's just back to Québec, as that's where the journey and the book end. And not – as some readers might have thought – with le Chauffeur killing himself by using the pipe he carries in his glove compartment to attach to the exhaust pipe – but by him asking Marie if she'll join him on the autumn round. And she asks 'Pour le meilleur et pour le pire?' ('For better and for worse?), which veers a little too close to the sentimental for comfort, but the reader is at least happy that le Chauffeur has re-discovered a reason to live, that he'll be doing his autumn round after all, and that he'll have a companion to help feed all the cats they meet on the way.

I just can't understand why for the English translation the decision was made to pluralise the title, as so much hinges on the existence of the one coming autumn round – there's even a prominent allusion to it on the back cover of the above edition.

Jacques Poulin: Volkswagen Blues (1984)

I first read this novel several years ago and found it slightly strange. And although on second reading I certainly find it far less strange, it's interesting that one of the two central characters in it says that people would see both of them as mad if they were expected to believe this story of a chase across two thirds of America following the thinnest and most unlikely leads to find a lost brother.

This is what la Grande Sauterelle (or The Big Grasshopper, called so because of her long legs) states towards the end of this enthralling book, which is only thirty years old but in some ways comes from a very different era. Hitch-hiking drives the narrative: dormobile driver Jack Waterman (a writer) picks up hitch-hiker la Grande Sauterelle and her pet kitten just outside Gaspé in Québec province, and largely through her intuition and psychological skills they come to discover vital snippets about Jack's brother Théo, a man he's searching for after ten or fifteen years because, well, it feels as if his life is collapsing and he needs something to keep him steady. Then (again towards the end) they pick up another hitch-hiker, an old man who finds odd jobs where he can and whose intuition leads Jack to his brother; Jack tells la Grande Sauterelle that the old man thinks he's Hemingway as he says he used to live in rue du Cardinal Lemoine in Paris, he's been to Cuba several times, he loves Key West, and the only house he has had was in Ketchum, Idaho: just a few of a number of references to writers that Poulin seems compelled to mention.

Today the drive wouldn't just not have happened because almost no one hitches anymore, but people merely have to turn to the internet to get information about people they're looking for. But a long road trip (and there are a few mentions of Kerouac in passing) is of course sexier, especially if you're a guy of forty by chance spending the summer with a beautiful half-Indian girl half your age, cuddling up at night in the sleeping bag with her – but then, there's virtually no mention of sex here, the only real occasion being when they hit the continental divide and la Grande Sauterelle strips naked ready for a sexy celebration with Jack, who can only respond by ejaculating prematurely.

Jack (usually just referred to as 'l'homme') doesn't exactly come over as fulfilling traditional masculine functions in this refreshingly feminist-leaning male-written novel in which la Grande Sauterelle not only has the brain power and the sex drive, but she's also pretty useful with a toolbox when the Volks breaks down and Jack is reduced to wiping the sweat from her brow as she works away. So it's perhaps not too surprising that he leaves her with the Volks in San Francisco and flies back to Québec in the end.

Are there any other messages here? Well, it's not necessarily too good an idea to go chasing across the continent after a long-lost brother who may turn out (as Théo does) to have 'creeping paralysis' and doesn't even recognise you when you finally find him. Oh, and Jack thinks that to hook a person into a book you have to start with a brilliant opening sentence: this book opens with 'Il fut réveillé par le miaulement d'un chat' ('He was awakened by the miaowing of a cat.')

I loved the book.