Sors de ce corps par François Leblanc

Leblanc, François. Sors de ce corps. Montréal: Triptyque, 2015. ISBN 978-2-89031991 -2. Pp. 192. $23 Can. In his first collection of short stories, Leblanc returns to the theme of middle age. His protagonists are tired out, measuring themselves against the perceived lives of younger people around them. They wear their lives like a worn fabric. The short-story format is new, but the modest means and marginal brokenness are standard fare for Leblanc.A Montreal-based mental health counselor who has long worked with parolees, homeless people fighting addiction, and others mostly just trying to stay alive, Leblanc is adept at portraying characters who feel the world is crashing down around them. In “Être soi-même,” a middle-aged man spends the evening partying hard in Montreal, with“friends”much younger than him, and creates such a disturbance that he ends up in a psychiatric hospital. In“Macallan, dix ans d’âge, cask strength,”a suicidal pensioner spends his last dollars on an excellent bottle of scotch, which he intends to enjoy with the handful of sleeping pills he hopes will end his life—until he learns a surprising new fact about his girlfriend. That story has a Maupassantian feel to it, especially at the end, but what makes it a Leblanc tale is the daily socio-economic reality of the main character. A sociology major in college, the nameless protagonist was forced early out of his working life by a debilitating car accident. It left him with just enough to live on: “C’était assez pour assumer le loyer d’un mois et demi à Montréal et m’acheter une caisse de Coors Light chaque semaine, mais pas suffisant pour aller me faire masser le dos par de grandes mulâtresses en maillot de bain sous le soleil de Cuba”(20–21). This particular expression of geography and consumerism is shared by characters across Leblanc’s work, especially the men. The city of Montreal is the literal center of this geography, as well as one of its major themes; Leblanc is chronicling the changing city at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Immigrants, for instance—one of the most pressing subjects for debate in Quebec nowadays—figure prominently here. In one uncharacteristically light tale, a cosmetician, realizing her clients are beginning to use the cheaper Vietnamese salons found around the city, goes on a quest to master a difficult and popular fingernail-painting technique practiced by this new competition . She hunts for a nail varnish called“Hong Kong Girl,”which seems only available in back alleys,in speakeasy-like shops apparently only open toVietnamese cosmeticians. The protagonist, Louise, is impressed: “[I]ls n’avaient pas gagné la guerre contre les Américains pour rien,” she thinks (51). All is not loss and decline, though. Leblanc’s characters draw us in enough that we can imagine them as the kind of people one finds in a real North American city. Read alongside the rest of his published work so far, Sors de ce corps is less a book about personal decline than it is a challenging love letter to Montreal and the lives it contains. University of Wisconsin, Madison Ritt Deitz 272 FRENCH REVIEW 89.3 ...

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