Life in the Court of Matane [Paperback]

Nadia Comaneci’s gold-medal performance at the Olympic Games in Montreal in 1976 is the starting point for a whole new generation. Eric Dupont watches the performance on TV, mesmerized. The son of a police officer (Henry VIII) and a professional cook—as he likes to remind us—he grows up in the depths of the Quebec countryside with a new address for almost every birthday and little but memories of his mother to hang on to. His parents have divorced, and the novel’s narrator relates his childhood, comparing it to a family gymnastics performance worthy of Nadia herself.Life in the Court of Mataneis unforgiving and we explore different facets of it (dreams of sovereignty, schoolyard bullying, imagined missions to Russia, poems by Baudelaire), each based around an encounter with a different animal, until the narrator befriends a great horned owl, summons up the courage to let go of the upper bar forever, and makes his glorious escape.

"I was so engrossed in Eric's personal quest to escape Matane that I found myself saying 'Wait! It can't end yet!' Trust me, you'll find yourself hoping Eric Dupont is somewhere in La belle province writing a sequel toLife in the Court of Matane . . . QC Fiction has done a great service to English readers everywhere by translating this popular Quebec novel for us. Bien fait." —James Fisher, miramichireader.ca

"One of Quebec's most daring and original writers." —La Presse

"If the Americans have John Irving and the Colombians Gabriel Garcia Marquez, we have Eric Dupont. And he’s every bit as good as them." —Voir

"By turns poignant, playful, and nostalgic, the book evokes ’70s Quebec with the quirky but successful device of combining an autobiographical family story with motifs drawn from fable, history, politics and myth . . . . Translator McCambridge beal3+