The Town Below. Roger Lemelin

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      Michael Gnarowski — Series Editor

      The Dundurn Group presents the Voyageur Classics series, building on the tradition of exploration and rediscovery and bringing forward time-tested writing about the Canadian experience in all its varieties.

      This series of original or translated works in the fields of literature, history, politics, and biography has been gathered to enrich and illuminate our understanding of a multi-faceted Canada. Through straightforward, knowledgeable, and reader-friendly introductions the Voyageur Classics series provides context and accessibility while breathing new life into these timeless Canadian masterpieces.

      The Voyageur Classics series was designed with the widest possible readership in mind and sees a place for itself with the interested reader as well as in the classroom. Physically attractive and reset in a contemporary format, these books aim at an enlivened and updated sense of Canada’s written heritage.

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      THE TOWN BELOW

      A NOVEL

      ROGER LEMELIN

      INTRODUCTION BY MICHAEL GNAROWSKI

      INTRODUCTION

      BEING WORDS FOR THE READER

      BY MICHAEL GNAROWSKI

      It is not likely that Roger Lemelin, an aspiring novelist in his early twenties, saw his first novel, Au pied de la pente douce, as a milestone work in the unfolding process of francophone (mostly Quebec) writing in Canada. What was more probable and likely is that Lemelin wanted to tell the story of a neighbourhood and its people not unlike the working-class milieu from which he himself came. The eldest of eleven children (only one girl!) of Florida and Joseph Lemelin, the latter a work-worn member of the urban underclass eking out an existence through part-time manual labour in order to support his family, Roger, from all accounts a bright and promising student, had to drop out in grade eight to go to work in his early teens and help support his siblings.

Any prospect of classical college (the usual route for ambitious young students) was beyond the Lemelin family’s means, so Roger enrolled in the equivalent of a trade school to study stenography, a skill that he acquired and put to good use in the early years of his employment. Intelligent and ambitious, it is no small wonder that the gaze of this young man, a product of the working-class district of Saint-Sauveur[1] of Quebec City, the basse-ville as it was called, should fix itself on the heights of the “Rock” on which stood all its history in walled stone, and on which had perched, sometimes only symbolically, the elites of New France, and now in Lemelin’s time, the new elites of church, state, and commerce.

      For most visitors to Quebec City, it is the “Upper Town” of the ancient capital (la vieille capitale and today the capital-nationale) that offers itself as the premium experience of historic buildings, convents, and churches redolent of French architecture. The great gates of Saint-Jean and Saint-Louis so reminiscent of medieval France as well as surviving portions of the old city walls, and the towering, iconic Château Frontenac, queen of hotels in that city, overawe the tourist. There are chic shopping and gastronomic delights with a choice of fine wines and elegant phrasing on restaurant menus. It is there at the old hotel Château Montcalm (now demolished), in its more than adequate restaurant the Marquis de Montcalm, known for its bonne cuisine, that one learned to order cuisses de nymphes, translated as “thighs of nymphs,” but also known as frogs’ legs to a less imaginative sensibility. There one also acquired a taste for Digby scallops, meilleurs au monde, said the waiter, as well as the occasional bit of sturgeon from the Gaspé. They did have a bonne cuisine, perhaps not as refined as at the old Restaurant Kerhulu, a short walk from Quebec’s finest bookshop, the Librarie Garneau, with its dark ceiling-high bookshelves, and where the clerks wore sleeve coverings and tucked pencils behind their ears. It is to the Librarie СКАЧАТЬ