Vieux chagrin

by Jacques Poulin

Le Vieux Chagrin est le récit de la vie oisive d'un écrivain en panne d'inspiration et de son chat chagrin. C'est le roman des petits riens de l'existence livré par un auteur discret à l'écriture sensible.

Genres: Canada, France, Fiction, Cats, Canadian Literature

Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

Reviews

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

A French-Canadian novel that I read in English translation. The original French title was Le Vieux Chagrin, so Mister Blue is an interesting choice for the title of the translation. I can appreciate though, that the literal translation doesn’t work that well in English.

The narrator lives in an isolated house in the Île D’Orléans in the lower St. Lawrence River, his only companion being an old tomcat, the Mister Blue of the title. Several stray cats also come and go, using his house as they please, and later there’s a sort of human stray who also does so. The narrator seems to be a very calm personality – you might say passive or even detached. He’s a former university literature teacher, who gave up that career to become a writer himself. He’s attempting to write a novel that features a love story, but struggles with it because, as he comes to realise, he has never really loved anyone himself. His loneliness gradually leads him into a world where imagination and reality merge into one.

The narrator’s comments about writing are, I imagine, a reflection of Poulin’s own thoughts on the subject. He says that words are like cats, they are independent and go where they want. When a writer starts a book, he has a destination in mind, but when he arrives he finds it’s something quite different from what he imagined.

This a very short novel which, in my opinion, is about the human need to make emotional rather than physical connections. There’s quite a bit of discussion about the soul. It’s probably one for those who enjoy good writing over plot and I’m sure would be best read in the original. It’s a bit of a change from my usual fare but I still enjoyed it – it only took me a couple of days to read. Quite a nice ending as well.

[Richard Derus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: By the Governor General Award and Quebec-Paris Prize-winning writer, a novel about a struggling writer and Mister Blue, his cat and sole companion until the day they discover a copy of The Arabian Nights in a cave along the beach. Tinged with melancholy, Mister Blue is at once playful, understated, and deeply human.

Jacques Poulin (1937-) is the author of twelve novels. Among his many honors are the 1978 Governor General’s Award, the 1990 and 2000 Molson Prize for the Arts, and the Gilles-Corbeil Prize in 2008. He lives in Québec City.

My Review: This book arrived in a surprise package from my sister, and we must be sharing some aetheric connection: Two days before I got the package, I was dithering between this Poulin title and Translation is a Love Affair to put in my Amazon cart for Money Day! Heh. Now I can read both!

'Books contain nothing, or almost nothing, that's important: everything is in the mind of the person reading them.'

If you were trying to find an idiotic remark, that one took the cake!

Thus speaks Jim, addressing an intimate audience, and self-talking his own, self-defined failure as a writer. You see, his (probably) imaginary love object won't show him her face, only leaving traces of herself in a riverside cave and a moored sailboat that slowly, steadily is repaired and painted and generally tarted up in the course of Jim's summer obsession.

By the end of the story, Jim's first novel-writing project has been abandoned, a love story that contains no lovers only friends. His second project, just begun as we leave the ramshackle house of Jim's youngest years, gains wind in its sails by his first, possibly first ever, emotional risk-taking act. It's not exactly a stunning shocking pearl-clutching shock, but it is amazing nonetheless. It is a pitch-perfect end to a beautiful chamber opera. I can't wait for the next one to arrive!

[Darryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim, the narrator of this outstanding novel, is a writer and former professor, who lives in his isolated childhood home alongside the St. Lawrence River, close to Quebec City. He lives alone, save for his old feline companion Mister Blue, as he attempts to write a "the most beautiful love story in the world." However, he has never been truly in love, and he struggles to provide a face and a voice to the woman in his novel.

One day Jim walks on the bank of the river, and he is surprised to see footsteps in the sand, leading to a nearby cave. He enters, and finds evidence that someone is living there. A copy of The Arabian Nights is alongside remnants of a campfire, which has been inscribed with the name "Marie K." The novelist changes her name in his mind to "Marika", and she serves as the inspiration for the woman in his novel.

He later meets a matronly woman, who knows Marika and gives him an enticing description of her. As he is befriended by the matron and a young woman, referred to as La Petite, Jim's heart is filled with Marika's presence and his growing love for her, while he awaits a reply to his letters of invitation. His friendship with La Petite deepens, as the two damaged souls find kinship and draw each other out of their emotional shells:

In spite of the difference in age and the other differences, which were many, La Petite and I had several things in common. And the most important of these common points, at least the one that brought me closest to her, was perhaps this: most of the time we were, both of us, walled up inside ourselves and busy trying to stick back together the fragments of our past.

Jim continues to search for the elusive Marika, as his heart progressively fills with love, longing and despair.

Mister Blue is a richly layered, haunting and deeply moving novel of love and memory, in which reality and fantasy blur and merge. It is both beautifully and simply written, and I adored and identified closely with Jim and La Petite, who will reside in my heart for many days. I can't recommend this novel highly enough, and I look forward to reading more of Poulin's translated works.

[René Paquin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mon troisième roman préféré de Jacques Poulin, avec la Tournée d’automne et Volkswagen blues. Que je relis pour une ixième fois et qui m’apporte encore autant de bonheur 😋

[Daniel Mercier · Rating 3 out of 5]

J’ai tellement rien compris de la fin ? Mais sinon c’est bon, doux, calme, paisible comme les autres livres de Jacques mais j’avoue que je l’ai fini avec un bon « heinnn??? »

[Léa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chats.

Honnêtement je suis sans mots. Ce livre est tout simplement magnifique.

[Alexe (mtlbibliophile) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ceci n'est pas mon premier Poulin, heureusement, car je sais qu'il peut faire mieux. Je n'ai pas particulièrement aimé ce roman. Malgré la beauté d'écriture qui se retrouve dans tous les livres de Poulin, j'ai trouvé que l'histoire aurait encore pu être travaillé. J'ai eu l'impression qu'il ne se passait quasiment rien, et c'était un peu décevant. Sur ce, ça ne sera pas mon dernier Poulin.

[Alicia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

quatre étoiles et un cœur, sur cinq ⭐️

[Czarny Pies · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a wonderfully tender novel about a sweet charming man who lives alone with his chat named le Vieux Chagrin (the old sorrow). He reflects upon his friends and his life. The most painful memories are those of the woman he loved most and whom he lost to a more dynamic lover.

Although the premise of this work may be slim, it is appropriately short and efficient in its execution. Le Vieux chagrin is a lovely read from one of the leading Quebecois writers of his era.

[Mandana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Blue is a cat and he has an easygoing character. The book is about relationships and how our approach to them shapes our personality. This is one of the few books that I am actually living it as if I am walking step by step by the main character, experiencing his realities and helping him solve the mystery of people, love and being. It is very much enjoyable!

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Blue is a book about an author trying to write a love story - alas he has never loved, so how can one write about what they do not know? A mysterious women arrives at the beach and, though never seeing her, he falls head over heals in love with her and she becomes the muse for his book. This book is a charming summer read.

[Sylvaine Yvenou · Rating 4 out of 5]

Jacques Poulin fait partie des rares auteurs que je fréquente en toute confiance. Ouvrir l'un de ses romans est pour moi un plaisir sans cesse renouvelé. Ne pensez pas que ce soit toujours une lecture confortable. Loin de là mais voilà il y a un je ne sais quoi dans l'écriture de ce romancier qui me plait me séduit , bref une fois encore je me suis laissée charmée.
Les rives du Saint Laurent face à Cap-rouge. Un écrivain plus très jeune, un chat au doux nom de vieux chagrin. Un écrivain en quête de son prochain roman. Il veut écrire une histoire d'amour mais ne lui faut il pas être amoureux pour cela? C'est des moins ce que son mentor Hemingway écrivait ...
L'été arrive et avec lui une énigme. Des pas sur le sable mouillé , un livre dans la caverne , un sac de couchage au doux parfum de trèfle. Rêve, illusion, réalité? En tous cas Petite est entrée dans son univers et a brisé sa solitude. les mots vont et viennent, s'échappent le plus souvent..
Un roman doux, nostalgique, plein de tendresse où l'on retrouve les incontournables de Poulin, les chats, la nature, Hemingway et la tendresse amoureuse .
Voilà je vous laisse découvrir ce beau roman et ce merveilleux auteur. Bonne lecture .

[Alice Kirouac Nascimento · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ce livre est selon moi d'un ennui total.
J'ai un énorme malaise avec sa pseudo relation avec Marika. Il est tellement creep. Genre c'est du gros bon sens qu'après une ou deux fois que tu essaie de reach quelqu'un ça marche pas, ben force pas le destin cette personne ne veut rien savoir.
J'ai l'impression que tout ce qui était supposé arriver, n'arrive pas pour finalement nous laisser sur une fin "d'espoir" sur le futur (qui si on regarde le déroulement de lhistorie, ces espoirs là arriveront probablement pas parce que Jim est quand même un incapable)
Le dernier chapitre n'avait aucun rapport.

[Rhaya · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoy Jacques Poulin’s writing, as I’m noticing the similarities between this book and Autumn Rounds: a slow, sensual, and poetic style that focuses on emotional connection and longing. I love the details of food, the beach, and the cats, and I found his vulnerability about his work as a writer very relatable as an artist.
“Even though writing had been my occupation for more than twenty years, even though I’d written half a dozen books, I was still as sensitive and vulnerable as I’d been at the beginning at the slightest remark about my work.”

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book speaks of books that allow the reader to feel a gentleness. It succeeds in being just that.

It's an idyll of a read, one that feels very much like the home by the sand where our narrator lives. It's quiet and internal and full of longings, and yet it isn't quite sad but hopeful.

[Alice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gentle and seems to claim the sunshine view that all we really need are a few spare parts and creatures for a satisfying many, many years of middle-aged life.

[Emilie Champagne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disons plutôt 3.5 sur 5. Ce n'est pas mon préféré de Jacques Poulin, mais j'aime la poésie et la musicalité de son oeuvre. Un roman beau et doux pour toutes les âmes blessées.

[Marjolaine Brodeur · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un rappel qu'une histoire, un livre, n'est qu'un agencement de mots et de phrases choisis par l'auteur.e.

[Valérie Marcoux · Rating 4 out of 5]

C'est toujours un bonheur de retrouver l'immense tendresse des romans de Jacques Poulin ❤️

[Laurie Caron · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5⭐️

[Jean Papillon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Un beau roman qui s'écoule comme le fleuve qu'il raconte. Cependant je suis resté décu de la facon précipitée dont se termine l'histoire.

[Valérie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Livre lu dans le cadre du cours ELC 102. J’ai mis du temps à embarquer dans l’histoire mais finalement je me suis attaché à Jim, la Petite et les autres!

[Élie lit · Rating 4 out of 5]

quatre étoiles et un coeur, sur cinq ⭐️

[Larissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review published at Three Percent: http://www.rochester.edu/College/tran...

***

The fictional world of Québécois novelist Jacques Poulin can, poetically speaking, be likened to a snow globe: a minutely-detailed landscape peppered with characters who appear to be frozen in one lovely, continuous moment. Mister Blue, recently published in a new English translation, captures this timelessness in a fluid and deceptively simple story about the complex bonds that can develop between completely unlike people, if only they are allowed to.

Brooklyn’s Archipelago Books has previously released two Poulin novels—Spring Tides and Translation is a Love Affair—both of which share some basic fundamentals with Mister Blue. Each of these slender novels feature reclusive literary types (authors and translators), their beloved cats (all with names worthy of T.S. Eliot’s Practical Cats: Matousalem, Mr. Blue, Charade, Vitamin), and enigmatic strangers who quickly insinuate themselves into the lives and imaginations of the aforementioned writers. But although Poulin frequently returns to the same themes, the same hyper-specific scenarios and characters in his work, each of his novels retain a freshness and idiosyncratic sweetness that reward readers with small revelations and happy coincidences.

Mister Blue opens on Jim, “the slowest writer in Quebec,” a former Hemingway scholar turned full-time novelist who now summers in his dilapidated childhood home, a ramshackle cottage in a quiet, uninhabited bay on the Ile d’Orleans. Jim’s daily writing follows a quiet routine with little to punctuate it other than semi-regular tennis matches with his brother, feeding and tending to his cats and the scrappy strays that invite themselves into his home, and solitary walks on the beach in front of his home. It is on just such a walk that Jim discovers footprints in the sand leading to a cave where someone has been camping. Finding a copy of The Arabian Nights in the cave with the name “Marie K.” written on the flyleaf, Jim becomes instantly besotted with this mysterious unseen stranger, whom he nicknames Marika.

Here, as in Translation is a Love Affair, real life quickly begins to intermingle with fiction and vice-versa. For Poulin’s characters, life itself is a process of composition, improvised and redrafted as unforeseen events take place. As Jim struggles to write a love story, he becomes convinced that his authorial problems can all be chalked up to the fact that he has ignored Hemingway’s rule: “a writer must stick to the subject he knows best.” He surmises that his story has stalled because “I was trying to write a love story without being in love myself.” Ergo, he whimsically decides, he must “take a closer interest in that person named Marika.”

But matters of the heart, much like matters of fiction, are not so easily constructed. Instead of meeting Marika, he meets a woman named Bungalow, a former housewife who left her “gilded cage” to run a shelter for young women in Old Quebec, and La Petite, who lives at the shelter but increasingly becomes a regular visitor at Jim’s cottage. The arrival of these two women takes both Jim’s fictional and real life love stories off course: the mysterious Marika continues to elude him, and obstinately, his fictional characters become friends instead of lovers, despite his frequent attempts to revise their relationship. The romantic story that he set out to write (and to live) gives way, ever so slowly, to a gentler, more protective, tender kind of love—that between himself and the curious, lovable, but often volatile La Petite—the love between a parent and child.

In simple, clean prose (musically rendered in Sheila Fischman’s translation) Poulin delivers his bittersweet tale with a restraint that belies true joy, the dogged optimism that complete strangers from totally different backgrounds and circumstances can find in each other real empathy and kindness. That such connections are right there in front of us, if only we trouble to look for them.

“What matters are the emotional ties that connect people and form a vast, invisible web without which the world would crumble,” Jim realizes. “Everything else to which people devote the greater part of their time, looking very serious as they do so, is of only minor importance.”

[Tonymess · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m going to do something outrageous, skip the Wikipedia summary and head straight to the “Canadian Encyclopaedia” to delve a little into the background of Jacques Poulin. There I learned that Poulin (born 23 September 1937) is the author of nine novels and the winner of several literary awards including the Prix David in 1995 and “is among the most widely read Quebecois novelists of his generation and the most respected by critics.” Geez that’s a strong call to make in an encyclopaedia “widely read of his generation?”, “THE MOST respected by critics”. I thought encyclopaedias were for facts – then again it may be true!!!

He earned two degrees at university in psychology and the arts and was a counsellor at a high school and then a translator for the federal government, after his first novel he devoted himself to writing, living in Paris for fifteen years. Interestingly enough if you search on Poulin at the Athabasca University site it says he was a “guidance counsellor” and a commercial and government translator and that he has returned to Quebec from France – ahhh the wonders of the internet.

It is interesting that he studied psychology as his works deal with the pain of solitude, the painful process of writing, the complexities of love and the machinations of everyday society. Themes he has possibly drawn from his studies?

A week ago I reviewed his work “Spring Tides” about a translator living alone on an island with his cat Matousalem, before Marie and her cat Moustache are dropped from the heavens, the peace and tranquillity of his solitude being further broken as more and more people are washed up (as also the rubbish arrives) with the spring tides.

Again we have the theme of spring, the isolation, loneliness, a dilapidated home and our protagonist being a writer. This work written in the first person and opening with the sentence: “Spring had arrived”. The cat this time is “Mister Blue” the title of our novel. Our narrator writes love stories and spends his time in the attic creating his works at a snail’s pace, having to feel along with the characters, who at times do not act as his story would like. One day he spots footprints in the sand (exactly the same shape as his own) and he follows them to the island’s cave where he finds a copy of The Arabian Nights, he leaves everything intact. On a further visit he notices the book has moved and he opens it to find it inscribed with the name Marie K. From there he dreams of a wonderful relationship with the mysterious Marika, who he has not met but who is slowly working through The Arabian Nights (in very short summary the tales of Scheherazade who to avoid execution tells the king a tale but does not end it, postponing her execution until the next tale and so forth for 1,001 nights). Early on in our novel our writer attempts to make contact with the mysterious Marika:

For my full review go to http://messybooker.blogspot.com.au/

[Caroline · Rating 3 out of 5]

Translated in English from French, an author's solitary writing idyll is broken when he spies footprints in the sand, oddly, the same size as his own, that lead him into a cave, wherein he finds a copy of The Arabian Nights with the name Marie K inscribed in it.

Developing an obsession with a woman he hadn't seen or met, he prepares his house to receive her, sends her an invitation to visit and spies on her sailboat anchored off the cove from his attic while he struggles with a bout of writer's block. He meets 4 women who appear to know Marika (as he has named her) and begins a relationship with them, and in a way, 2 of them help unlock ideas for the book he's writing and a personal revelation.

There's a beautiful tenderness that suffuses the book and in the fantasy the writer creates about and around the woman of his obsession. However, there's an unsettling moment with the youngest of the women he gets to know. She's somewhat fragile, had been abused in her childhood, is searching for her biological parents and who has taken to spending quite a lot of time in his house because she finds comfort there.

I'm not quite sure why the book is titled after the name of his cat though.

[Marie-Eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,6⭐️

J’ai tant aimé Jacques Poulin, plus jeune. Le fleuve, les chats, les livres, la lenteur.

Aujourd’hui, je peine à lui pardonner ses failles. Dans Vieux Chagrin, son apitoiement sur lui-même est difficile à supporter. Son obsession pour une femme imaginaire et sa propension à l’élever au rang de sainte devient de plus en plus énervant à mesure qu’on avance dans le livre. Surtout que de vraies femmes habitent progressivement sa vie, mais ne semblent pas vraiment l’intéresser, comparé à sa chimère. Je suis triste pour lui, c’est pathétique.

Pour moi, le style, le décor, le calme et la lenteur sauvent encore un peu ce livre. J’ai pris plaisir à le finir, surtout pour passer du temps au bord du fleuve.

[Lillian · Rating 4 out of 5]

In an old frame cottage on the Ile d’Orleans in Quebec, Jim, a writer is spending a magical summer battling writers block with his only companion, an insightful cat named Mister Blue.
This is a story about love (its illusiveness), about the soul (what is it?), and the enigmatic soul mate (does it exist?). It is a little about the creative process of writing as well (writers often write about what they know – writers and writing).
Poulin has made it all fit together snugly like the pieces of a puzzle. Short, cogent, and evocative.
It is a story of the possible.

[Mariane Demers · Rating 5 out of 5]

"J'essayais d'écrire une histoire d'amour sans être moi-même amoureux. J'avais sans doute choisi ce sujet, parce que, me sentant vieillir, j'avais peur qu'il ne me reste pas le temps d'être amoureux, une dernière fois." Il y a de ces rares romans qui -vous le savez secrètement- ont été écrits pour vous, juste pour vous...une âme soeur, vous vous y retrouvez, vous vous y perdez. "Le vieux chagrin", c'est mon livre!