Maria Chapdelaine

Reading Maria Chapdelaine had me in tears this last week and I wondered why. What was it about this book that is so piercingly beautiful, and why was it that I had never even heard of it, never mind read it, before now?

A young Frenchman, Louis Hémon, wrote it one hundred years ago about French-Canadian life in the rural area around Lac-Saint-Jean far up the Saguenay River above Chicoutimi, Quebec. He sensitively portrays the lives, environment and choices of the people there.

Maria, her parents, family, suitors, neighbors, were immediately recognizable and familiar to me, probably because I myself am of French-Canadian descent, and there are memories that carry on inside us for hundreds of years, even though we may not be aware of them.

Hémon names, for his artistic purpose, François Paradis as Maria's great love, although Paradis is in fact a very common name in that part of the world, and the source of my own surname before it got anglicized.

But I think that another reason I was so engaged with this book is that it presents the stark, basic reality of  nature, life, work, love, sickness and death, so very clearly. I immediately feel those stark realities because of my own conscious and unconscious French-Canadian spirit, yes, but equally because they are the matters that all of us encounter. Hémon catches the universal in that particular.

And why had I not heard of this book before now? Perhaps it's because I myself somehow live out there above Lac-Saint-Jean in 1914.

Chapdelaine Country by Clarence Gagnon

"Je ferai ce livre comme s'il m'était destiné," écrit Clarence Gagnon quand il s'engage à créer les illustrations pour une édition de luxe de Marie Chapdelaine, le roman de Louis Hémon devenu l'incarnation du patrimoine culturel canadien-français.
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