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! ( )

I understood that during my whole life I’d never really been in love. I’d only looked for affection. I’d done lots of things to make people like me, but I’d never loved anybody.

No surprise then, that Jim, a solitary, middle-aged writer living outside Quebec City, develops writer’s block while drafting a love story. But how he tries to work through that writer’s- and love-block is surprising, and mysterious, and I enjoyed this short novel.

Two years ago, I enjoyed another novella by Poulin, Translation Is a Love Affair, and thought often of it while reading this one. The familiarity seemed comforting at the time but, in retrospect, I’m growing disappointed by the frank similarity in characters, story, tone, style, structure and length. I’m interested (and wary) to get to his Spring Tides. ( )

Once again, Poulin has crafted a story that has the feel of a folk tale: calm, humorous, haunting and compassionate. Poulin will leave you wondering about what is reality and what is imagination as he tells us the story of Jim, an author struggling with writer's block, who starts to find the cure in an obsession with a woman he has never met.

He makes simple look effortless. ( )

Jim is not a happy man, and his unhappiness intrudes upon his work, the writing of love stories, which proceeds at a crawl, diverts itself, pauses, grinds to a halt. He lives on an island in the St. Lawrence River in a house his father, years earlier, moved across the bay. Along with the house came memories, good and bad, of Jim’s early life, his failed marriage, his abandoned academic career, his relationship with his younger brother. It sounds like a recipe for despair, and certainly Jim borders on that state. But he has a couple of things going for him: his cats, including Mister Blue, and an inner drive for love, which in this case takes the form of his artistic muse, the mysterious Marika, who haunts a cave near the shore and whom he longs for incessantly but never quite meets.

Much of Jacques Poulin’s novel has a dreamlike quality. It ruminates. It mulls things over. It is full of false starts, erasures, and abandoned story lines. It is, in short, perhaps, an exploration of writerly creativity. Jim’s infatuation with (the possibly imaginary) Marika, who curiously seems to share his love of story (e.g. The Arabian Nights) and his shoe size (as evidenced by her footprints in the sand), traces the pattern of the difficulty he is having writing his current novel. Along the way, Jim encounters others who have been disappointed by love, or damaged by it. Each is working to reclaim some semblance of equanimity, or the possibility of new growth in healthier directions and locales.

I wondered, as I read this short novel, how much the island in the stream (which is nevertheless close enough to the sea to be affected by the tides) symbolises the artist. But I suspect there are a number of levels of meaning interweaving here, some of which might only surface if one were to read it in its original French. Gently recommended. ( )

There is a magical quality about this story. It's very subtle, and full of delightful little details. Have you ever tried writing or imagining a story and discovered that your characters are not ready to cooperate with your plan? Rather, you cooperate with them, as the parallels in your life unfold in tandem. This is the charming theme of this book. I didn't want it to end. It has a lot of the same elements as Poulin's "Translation is a Love Affair," -- very similar compelling characters, the lovely setting, a mystery, and exquisite perception of the present moment. ( )