Imagen del autor

Catherine Leroux

Autor de Granta 141: Canada

6+ Obras 186 Miembros 4 Reseñas

Sobre El Autor

Créditos de la imagen: Julie Artacho

Obras de Catherine Leroux

Granta 141: Canada (2017) — Editor — 58 copias
The Party Wall (2013) 52 copias
Madame Victoria (2015) 38 copias
The Future (2020) 27 copias
L'avenir (2020) 6 copias
LA MARCHE EN FORET (2012) 5 copias

Obras relacionadas

Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016) — Traductor, algunas ediciones1,277 copias
Fabrizio's Return (2006) — Traductor, algunas ediciones50 copias
The Wagers (2019) — Traductor, algunas ediciones24 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Fecha de nacimiento
1979
Género
female
País (para mapa)
Canada
Lugar de nacimiento
Rosemère, Quebec, Canada
Lugares de residencia
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Biografía breve
Catherine Leroux (born 1979 in Rosemère, Quebec) is a Canadian novelist who writes usually in French.Leroux was born in Quebec in 1979 and she took philosophy as her degree. She was the Toronto correspondent of Radio Canada.[1] She is a shortlisted nominee for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize for The Party Wall, a translation by Lazer Lederhendler of her 2013 novel Le mur mitoyen.[2]

Leroux's first novel, La marche en forêt, was published in 2011[3] and was a finalist for the 2012 Prix des libraires du Québec. Le mur mitoyen followed in 2013,[4] and was a finalist for the 2013 Grand prix du livre de Montréal and won the Prix littéraire France-Québec in 2014.[5]

She published the short story collection Madame Victoria in 2015.[6] The book won the Prix Adrienne-Choquette in 2016

Miembros

Reseñas

In this speculative novel, Detroit is an independent, French-speaking entity. Urban decay has led to run down homes, few services and little employment. Children have taken refuge in the forest, banding together to secure safety and shelter. When our protagonist, Gloria, arrives following the murder of her daughter, she finds her granddaughters missing and goes into the forest to find them. This is a grim story, but there is a hopefulness in the way so many characters persevere and band together to support each other.

It's well written, and the characters are reasonably well developed. Just not my cup of tea.
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Denunciada
LynnB | Feb 22, 2024 |
hmmmm.

okay. so. this is a tricky one for me to rate. (i read this for an in-person book club i've just started attending.) there was much i liked and admired about this book, yet there were things that just didn't work for me. let me get the criticisms out of the way first:

i really had trouble with the flow of the book. granted, i managed to go into it not realizing it was connected short stories so i take ownership for that bit of dumb-dumbness. but setting that aside, this is what happened: in the very first story (heartbreaking) we are introduced to an empathetic nurse. in an unusually short amount of time, i got very attached to him. and then he was gone. and i wanted more from/about him and his daughter. later on in the book, he crops up in another story... but it was so in passing, he barely took root before i was missing him again. silly. i know! along with that wee issue, every chapter is a new beginning. new version of victoria. there is no subtle way to segue from one story to the next. moving from one iteration of victoria to the next was jarring. (though i recognize this could be a very desired effect, this feeling of being unnerved.) my final minor issue had to do with consistency. apart from confirmed identity, we are given very specific information about who the discovered bones were from - gender, age, geography, state of health. some of the imagined victorias were beyond these boundaries. so that was a bit of a puzzle to me (only because the author laid it out for us upfront. if the information garnered from the bones has been less vague, i likely would not even be thinking about this point.)

so that's my petty niggling.

on the upside - and there is more than one:

leroux is a lovely writer, and i enjoyed the translation. despite the difficulties endured by the various victorias, the writing was a sustained exercise in elegance. if that makes sense? i'm not totally sure how to describe it. the writing is beautiful, but it can also be matter-of-fact at times. somehow, leroux has balanced that in a formal way that doesn't feel pretentious.

leroux went straight for my empathy gene. OOF! as i was reading, i found it difficult to not become attached to many of the victorias, and feel worry and concern for them. with the start of each new victoria, the outcome is known. the in-between was fairly harrowing for many of the victorias.

this is a very creative and clever book. rather than smashing us in the face with its purpose, leroux is a kind guide. i believe her purpose in writing each of these stories, and fictionalizing a true event, was to provide a window into the lives of women, and the challenges faced just by existing. the sad point of truth is that a real woman disappeared, and died outside. no one missed her, or was looking for her. even after intense efforts to identify her and find family or friends, investigators (and the media) were not successful. how easy it is for a woman to vanish, and no one notices. leroux gives value and purpose to each of her victorias.

there were some motifs which spanned across the stories which really grabbed my attention and made me curious... unfortunately they weren't much discussed at the meeting. if you've read this one, i would LOVE to hear your thoughts on the motifs of the straight north arrow, one blue eye and one green eye, and the repeated use of 'eon' as a surname - d'eon, on one occasion.

this book made for a really interesting book club discussion - there really is a lot of ground to cover in considering each story, and the volume as a whole. the group was fairly divided between loving it and really disliking it. one member was so angry at the book - mostly, i believe, by what the book asks of readers. they were not having it. another member was so emotionally gutted by it they had to set the book aside after each story to recover. it did turn out to be a polarizing read for the group. so i was a bit of an outlier by falling in the middle. but... books that create this reaction always seem to have more dynamic discussions, don't they?
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Denunciada
JooniperD | Oct 27, 2019 |
A bit weak overall but highlights include Mangilaluk's Highway - Nadim Roberts, The Rememberer - Johanna Skibsrud, Swimming Coach - Anosh Irani, How To Pronounce Knife - Souvankham Thammavongsa, Two Indians - Falen Johnson
 
Denunciada
Opinionated | Jun 9, 2018 |
Family is at the crux of Catherine Leroux’s The Party Wall, which traces the fortunes of four sets of relatives, primarily siblings, who undergo life-altering events and reach a new understanding of themselves and each other as a result. Six brief pieces about Monette and Angie take place on a single day as the two young sisters go through a series of encounters on the streets of their home town, the last of which leaves Angie injured and fighting for her life. In two longer stories, the fraught relationship between widowed Madeleine and her son Edouard is the focus, a relationship that is complicated by a shocking medical diagnosis. Another pair of stories follows the steep fall of power couple Ariel and Marie from the lofty perch of political supremacy to a situation of penurious obscurity in a rural backwater, a shift in fortune caused by a devastating discovery concerning their family lineage. And two stories tell of the separate quests of siblings Simon and Carmen to learn more of their own tangled family histories following the death of their mother Frannie. Leroux invents clever scenarios (loosely based on those of some actual people, as she acknowledges in a postscript) and creates rapid-fire drama as these tales of personal destiny and identity veer in unexpected and surprising directions. Leroux’s voice in these stories is confident, and has been smoothly rendered into English by Lazer Lederhendler. Some reviewers refer to Leroux’s book as a novel, and though many connections are drawn among the stories and characters from some appear in others, most readers will understandably experience the book as a collection of linked stories.… (más)
 
Denunciada
icolford | Feb 16, 2017 |

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Estadísticas

Obras
6
También por
3
Miembros
186
Popularidad
#116,758
Valoración
3.9
Reseñas
4
ISBNs
27
Idiomas
1

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