In 1966, Réjean Ducharme, then a 24-year-old unknown, published L’Avalée des avalés, this debut novel that would go on to serve as a zeitgeist for several generations of French-Canadian readers. Over the last fifty years, it has become a cornerstone for a culture, taught in high schools and universities as the foundation of the modern Québécois literature. Astoundingly, an English-language edition of the book hasn’t been in print since 1968, and has never before been available in Canada.

At nine years old, Berenice feels trapped by home, family, and dogmas both real and invented. Precocious and over-intelligent, she despises her dysfunctional parents too viciously, loves her brother Christian too passionately, and follows the logical pirouettes of her imagination to conclusions too dangerous. She lives on a secluded island, where she hatches plans to run away with Christian and escape her mother’s needy overtures for affection. When on the cusp of puberty Berenice becomes too wild for even her parents to control, she’s sent to live in New York with her father’s ultra-religious relatives where, pushed to confine her impulses, she instead forces herself forward to new extremes.

Gripping and hallucinatory, Swallowed is every bit as shocking and relevant today as it was upon first publication in 1966.

Novelist and playwright Réjean Ducharme was born in Saint-Félix-de-Valois, in the region of Joliette, Quebec in 1941. He spent seven months in the Canadian Air Force in 1962, then worked as a salesman, office clerk and cab driver before travelling across Canada, the United States and Mexico for three years. Ten of his works have been published by Gallimard which is quite an accomplishment, given the prestige of this French publishing company. His first novel, L’Avalée des avalées The Swallower Swallowed (1966), won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1967 and the French CBC’s Canada Reads competition in 2005. For this work he was one of the nation’s first writers to be nominated for France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt. His second novel, Le Nez qui voque (1967), was awarded the Prix littéraire de la province de Québec. It is published here under the title Miss Take. These two, plus a third novel, L’Océantume (1968), were published during the years of the Quiet Revolution in Quebec and made a significant impact. Ducharme wrote the plays, Le Cid maghané and Ines Pérée et Inat Tendu in 1968, and Ha ha! which won the Governor General’s Literary Award in 1982 has also been translated into English. He received the Prix Belgique-Canada in 1973 for L’Hiver de force and the Prix France-Canada in 1976 for Les Enfantômes. In addition, he wrote the lyrics of several songs for Robert Charlebois (1976). Ducharme also wrote the screenplay for two very successful films: Les Bons Débarras (1979) and Les Beaux Souvenirs (1981) produced by Francis Mankiewicz. After a fourteen-year silence, Ducharme surprised the world with two novels, Dévadé (1990) and Va savoir (1994). Réjean Ducharme is considered one of the most significant and original voices in Quebec literary history. He has also exhibited his sculptures and paintings created with found objects, under the pseudonym Roch Plante. He is not only one of Quebec’s most influential playwrights, but also one of the province’s enigmas: the man has not been seen in public for over a decade and there are few photographs of him. He followed his early work with other novels including La fille de Christophe Colomb which has since been adapted for the theatre and translated into English as The Daughter of Christopher Columbus (Toronto: Guernica Editions, 2000). His play Ha! ha! (1978, Théâtre du Nouveau Monde /TNM, directed by Jean-Pierre Ronfard ) won him another Governor General’s Award in 1982 and the Grand Prix littéraire du Journal de Montréal. Ducharme’s work is very difficult to categorize; it delights in a kind of dark, childlike fantasy and skates along difficult issues like Quebec Nationalism, language and culture and, of course, personal and social identity. He has also written films and lyrics. In 1994 he won the Quebec Government’s Athanase-David Literary prize. In 1999 he was awarded the Grand Prix national des lettres by the minister of culture for France. He sent writer Roger Grenier to pick up the prize. His novel Gros Mots was published in 2000 by Gallimard. His other plays include: Le Cid maghané (Festival de Sainte-Agathe, 1968), Le marquis qui perdit (Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, 1970, directed by André Brassard ), Ines Pérée et Inat Tendu (Nouvelle Compagnie Théâtrale, 1976). In 2001, TNM mounted an adaptation of his novel L’Hiver de force as part of the company’s 50th anniversary celebrations and subsequently toured the production to Paris.

Will Browning holds a Docorate of Modern Langauges in French and spanish from Middlebury College, and an MA in spanish from the Université de Paris. He is currently Professor at Boise State University. Browning publishes French-language reviews and articles, in addition to his translation work.

Réjean Ducharme's profile page

Madeleine Stratford is a poet, a literary translator, and a professor at Université du Québec en Outaouais. In 2017, her English translation of a picture book by German author Lilli L'Arronge was shortlisted for a Kirkus Prize. Her French translations of Marianne Apostolides (Elle nage, 2016) and Cherie Dimaline (Pilleurs de rêves, 2019) were both finalists for a Governor General's Literary Award.

Madeleine Stratford's profile page