Mind Picker: Songs for the Cold of Heart

Nothing is so foreign to the heart of a tormented lover than seeing the pain of absence disappear, as though her heart had been fuelled by this angst ever since she first laid eyes on Madeline from behind the willow hedge. Now she would have to work on getting the ban lifted on visiting the Lamontagne house. The two girls threw snowballs at each other and slid along Rue Fraserville's steep sidewalks, breaking into a song for the cold of heart as they revelled in winter's arrival right down to the very last snowflake.

I get that people are saying that Songs for the Cold of Heart is reminiscent of John Irving – it starts with the far-fetched and ironic tone of A Prayer for Owen Meany or The Hotel New Hampshire; the latter of which author Éric Dupont references outright – but it soon turns into a different kind of book; soon after that, turning into another (and at six hundred small font pages, there's room enough here for several distinct works). So, while I found that first part to be the most entertaining, and found the whole to be a bit too long, I liked all of the parts in different ways. I'm delighted that this book made the Giller Prize shortlist – it might not have come to my attention otherwise – and I wouldn't mind seeing it win.

You know you're in love the moment you walk up to someone trembling, I'd think to myself. And since I associated trembling with the freezing cold, having grown up in East Prussia, I associated love, that awful feeling, with the sumptuous winters of my native land. You're the only one in Berlin who could know what I mean by that, Kapriel. You need to feel all the coldness of that music. I think it's a song for the cold of heart. For people like us, Kapriel. “I wait for you, trembling”. Words to be sung in despair, one last cry from the heart, a petition of sorts. Do you follow me? It takes someone familiar with the body's tremors, the inexplicable bumps and jolts of the nervous system, to understand Schubert.

In the first part of Songs for the Cold of Heart, we meet Louis “the Horse” Lamontagne: a former travelling fairground strongman, now working as a mortician in his hometown of Rivière-du-Loup, whose children know that a glass of warm gin is all it takes to get their Papa telling tales of his youthful exploits. Everything from the incredible story of Louis' birth to his conscription into the American Army during WWII makes you wonder if Louis isn't pulling his children's legs just a bit. In the next part, Louis' daughter Madeline is shown growing up in an age that sees the Catholic Church begin to lose its grip on Quebec and this part is much less lighthearted: eventually rejecting her parents and her small-town life, Madeline goes on the become a famous restaurateur who refuses to share stories about her family or childhood with her own children. In the third part, as the new millennium approaches, Madeline's estranged son, Gabriel, has moved to Berlin in a rejection of his heritage, and unwittingly befriends an old woman who might hold the key to where he came from. Told mostly in letters and diary form, this third section really does feel like a different book, but with so many details repeated throughout – Polish giants, gold crosses, and mustachioed popes; teal eyes, bass clef birthmarks, a Madeline (or is that a Magda?) in every generation – it all ties together into one big, epic whole.

If the themes of this book could be condensed into two quotes, they would be:

When an outside force takes control of your body, it's fascism. Or its toned-down version: Catholicism.

And:

While ordinary love is cruel, Puccinian love is merciless.

It's interesting that Dupont chose as his main characters a French Canadian family with German roots. On the one hand, Dupont never misses a chance to mock the Catholic clergy – whether corpulent or manipulative priests, an archbishop who wants to meet a young leotarded Louis for deviant purposes, or poor old Sister Mary of the Eucharist with her “pale, haunting ugliness”, “a face like a wet weekend” and “a nose as long as a day without bread”. And while the Church famously had control over every aspect of Quebec life for centuries, when Magda begins recalling life in East Prussia under the Nazis, the similarities are clear (and especially with both the Catholics' and the Nazis' obsession with breeding more babies for their causes and rooting out homosexuals). And it's also an interesting choice that throughout the generations, many characters are obsessed with the opera Tosca; this mercilessness of Puccinian love is both talked about and demonstrated, and by the end, this felt more like a tragic opera than a straightforward novel; there are repetitions and coincidences that are believable and inevitable because of this operatic foundation. And all that worked for me – there's value here as a Quebec perspective on the entirety of the twentieth century if nothing else. Maybe a bit too long, but again, the book I like best on the 2018 Giller Prize shortlist.