I wrote this is March 2013:
Coming of age, slice of life, memoirist novel. . .
I add these notes in May of 2016:
. . . and this is the heart of it, yes: PAUL HAS A JOB, as many of have or have had! So what? Is this a joke?! A book about that?! But no, it is not a joke, there's not irony in it, it is what people do and it is worth telling just because it is common and not spectacular.
There's a kind of nostalgia in it for me, too, a white kid like Paul/Michel, basically his age, who had the kinds of summers. Not much happens and yet when you are living this life, everything does. Only the little things are magnified. And he honors that.
And now I have read several of his stories, linking them together in my head, Rabagliati's fictional autobiography told over decades of his professional work. Little slices of life, and what does it all add up to? A life! And the accumulation of stories is sort of amazing, on the whole! Beautifully drawn, all of it. In Quebec they call Rabagliati their Tintin.