Reading Guide

Born in Ottawa in 1953, Daniel Poliquin is one of Canada’s leading francophone writers. The author of nearly a dozen books in French, mainly novels and short story collections, he holds Master’s degrees in both German and Comparative Literature, and a doctorate in French Literature.

Poliquin’s early works, such as his first novel, Temps pascal (1982), and L'Obumsawin and Nouvelles de la capitale (both 1987), sought to establish the existence of Franco-Ontarian literature and his later books have garnered the author a number of literary awards.

Poliquin’s third novel Visions de Jude (1990; translated into English as Visions of Jude and republished in 2000 as La Côte de Sable) earned him the 1990 Grand prix du Journal de Montréal and the 1991 Prix littéraire Le Droit; his novel L'écureuil noir (1995; translated into English as Black Squirrel), was a Governor General’s Award nominee and won the 1995 Prix littéraire Le Droit; and L'homme de paille (1998; translated into English as The Straw Man) won the 1998 Trillium Book Award, the province of Ontario’s top writing prize. Poliquin was also awarded the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing for his non-fiction work In the Name of the Father: An Essay on Quebec Nationalism (Douglas & McIntyre, 2001), the English version of Le Roman colonial (2000). Most recently, Poliquin’s latest book, A Secret Between Us (Douglas & McIntyre, 2007) was short-listed for the 2007 Giller Prize while the French version, La Kermesse (Éditions du Boréal, 2006), won the Ottawa Book Award, as well as being a nominee in the French-language category of the 2007 Trillium Book Awards.

The award-winning author is also a Chevalier in the Ordre de la Pléiade, a recipient of the Queen’s Jubilee Medal, and a Member of the Order of Canada. In 2006, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Ottawa.

All of Poliquin’s novels have been translated into English (the majority of which have been published by Douglas & McIntyre) and the author is a noted literary translator himself, who has translated many important books into French, including works by Mordecai Richler, Jack Kerouac, W.O. Mitchell, Matt Cohen, and Douglas Glover.

Daniel Poliquin lives in Ottawa (where he works as a parliamentary interpreter) and in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia.

A Secret Between Us (Douglas & McIntyre Publishers): When young Lusignan sets off from Ottawa to the First World War with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in the fall of 1914, he has already survived a tragicomic Catholic childhood and a writing career that has brought him both acclaim and disgrace. Shortly before he departs for Europe, Lusignan has an encounter with a fellow officer, the aristocratic Essiambre d'Argenteuil, which proves to be the defining moment of his life.

Returning from Europe a hollow man, Lusignan keeps the memory alive by shadowing Amalia Driscoll, a woman whose straight-laced proprieties were challenged by this same d'Argenteuil. He encounters Concorde, the untutored young maid struggling to get by in the Flats district of Ottawa, and the Capuchin monk Father Mathurin, who longs for martyrdom in a foreign land. As their lives interweave and their futures rise and fall, what emerges is a vivid evocation of an entire society in the midst of an astonishing transformation. Providing the backdrop to Poliquin's incisive character study is a vivid picture of a pivotal era in Canadian history.

I AM THE FLESH MADE WORD.

A particularity that was my stock in trade when I was a journalist: secure in my role as arbiter of opinion, I overthrew governments between two morning coffees, denounced liars and rained down honours on the virtuous. In my novels it was simpler still. With circumstance obedient to my whims, women fell in love at first sight with the man I dreamed of being, and I rewrote history according to my tastes. All I needed was a credulous public for everything to be true.

When I write now, it is to beg my father for subsistence, and my only readings are the classified ads that offer work to those who lack it. I would love to make an honest man of myself, gainfully employed, but my brain mocks my dim ambitions: it continues to weave fantasies without my consent, spawning and altering universes for which I no longer have any use. My mind plays this game against my will, leaving me drained of strength. And wanting one thing only: to become one of those trivial creatures who materialize and dematerialize in my head, only to melt away during one of my periodic spells of amnesia. I must stop dreaming during the day and confine to the night those visions that vanish with the coming of dawn. For now I know that the imagination can hold freedom in thrall.

My memories are of no more use to me, I must be done with them. A difficult task, as despite myself I retain all the stories that others have told me, as if I didn’t have enough of my own. My mother would have said that this curse was my punishment for a life of sin.

She died just before the battle of Vimy. The telegram was signed by the village postmistress, who must have pitied my illiterate father, otherwise she would never have written to the happy reprobate I was: “Your mother is dead. Pray.” I sought out my warrant officer, hoping that my loss might garner me a two-day leave that would free me to go and ask Nurse Flavie from the Vendée if she might one day love me. The officer had a good laugh: “My ass, Sergeant, that’s the fourth time she’s died, your old lady! You should try doing in your father for a change!” I protested a little. I even swore that this time it was true. He told me to screw o. I consoled myself with the thought that the imminent death of my mother had already earned me two leaves in Droucy, where Nurse Flavie’s unit was encamped. She was the first woman in my life whom I’d desired more than once.

Had I known my story would break the heart of Private Léon Tard, my friend and subaltern, I wouldn’t have told him anything at all. We were digging graves for our comrades killed in action, and when he insisted on knowing why I wasn’t singing as much as usual, I told him about the warrant officer’s coarse laugh. He fell into my arms, sobbing. Impossible to calm him down. “I’m sorry, but I’m so sad for you. Your mama…” A colossus like Tard who weeps hot tears is hard to resist. I managed to console him, promising to make him a corporal one day.

Our job was to bury, the two of us, half a dozen lads who’d not made it through the night. As it happened, they were amputees whose coffins weighed almost nothing. A light workday. And so to ease his pain a little, Tard told me how, at the age of seven, he had lost his own mother. She died in childbirth while he was playing in the farmyard with a stick and hoop, and he had given a kick to an old hen that was in his way. “When they told me that Mama had gone to heaven, I thought right away it was my fault because I’d been mean to the hen. Then I asked myself how we’d manage for supper that night, since Mama wouldn’t be there to cook for us, and that made me hungry. I still get famished every time I think of her.” He began again to moan so loudly that he almost dropped the little corporal from Ontario who’d been gutted by a shell, and whom we’d liked a lot because he whistled so nicely when he was shaving. Seeing Tard with his orphan face too large for his age, I thought I might shed a few tears along with him, but he had already drenched my handkerchief. I can still, from time to time, respond to the suering of others, even though my own leaves me cold. It is all the fault of my fickle imagination, which finds me unworthy of interest.

Tard had had the misfortune of being adopted by his uncle and aunt, who already had nine children and could well have done without the four new mouths to feed that the death of their widowed sister-in-law landed on their doorstep. For the rest of his short childhood he was accused of taking up too much space and eating like a pig. His uncle sent him to the woods as a kitchen helper at the age of ten, and there, frightened by all the lumberjacks, who cursed as though the good Lord were dead, he missed his mother even more, and even the adoptive family that was so happy to get rid of him. After five or six years he got tired of handing over all his wages to his uncle as compensation for the man’s goodness. He fled the forest for the factories in Massachusetts, but after six months he crawled back to his Quebec hole like a beaten dog returning to its master. “Yes, I understand why you’re laughing at me, Sergeant. It’s true that our house smelled of piss, sweat, cabbage soup. What else? Oh yes, it also smelled of sour milk, overcooked meat, dirty laundry, but it was still my nest, my place. It’s hard, when you’re homesick…” So as not to add to his troubles, I drew on my pipe like a man who is wise to life’s mysteries, and said no more. He would not have wept so hard had he known my mother.

© 2007 D&M Publishers Inc.

Reviews

"Poliquin’s A Secret Between Us deals with the way a war and its aftermath is experienced in a unique cultural setting, where ethnicities intermingle against a complex historical background. It is rendered in prose that blends hyperrealism with kinetic lyricism. …The Giller nomination ought not to have surprised as many as it obviously has. It’s not just that Poliquin’s earlier novels have been highly praised… it’s that A Secret Between Us is world class."

Books in Canada, Nov 30, 2007

"A Secret Between Us is nestled in with Michael Ondaatje and M. G. Vassanji on the short list for this year's $50,000 Scotiabank Giller Prize. If it is a dark horse in this race, it is also a wild ride, more unbroken stallion than trained thoroughbred... A Secret Between Us is funny. It is the first-person narration of a robust French Catholic named Lusignan. …How can we not love Lusignan? He falls from grace in the military without the slightest care, he pursues one woman while sleeping with another. He drinks, he lets his emotional wounds fester rather than tend them. He is so corporeal, so human, we know him from the first sentence: ‘I am the flesh made word.’ Indeed."

The Globe & Mail, Nov 3, 2007

"The story is surprisingly involving. The evocative economy with which Poliquin writes (or Winkler translates) is a marvel of sensible sing-song sentences of pure poetry and storytelling."

CD Syndicated, Nov 3, 2007

NB Telegraph Journal (Saint John, NB) interviews Daniel Poliquin: “I now believe you should burn all your bridges with every book, otherwise, you end up repeating the same stuff, and you become boring. …I have nothing left in me now, I am emptied out, but it doesn’t matter, inspiration has a way of replenishing itself.”

New Brunswick Telegraph Journal, Nov 1, 2007

"[Poliquin’s] Ottawa, viewed in all its uptight glory from the skewed and skewering perspective of a charismatic Franco-Ontarian outsider, charlatan and gigolo manque, is a welcome and fitting satire of a time and place that, in our literature, is often read as lofty and aloof."

Ottawa Citizen, Oct 14, 2007

"The devil is in the details, where he rightly belongs. …A Secret Between Us is a welcome contrast to the vast library of earnest self-important historical novels about great Canadians and their important deeds."

Vancouver Sun, Oct 6, 2007