In 1945 novelist Gabrielle Roy helped create a new direction for francophone literature in Canada with Bonheur d'occasion (translated as The Tin Flute, 1947), a frank and uncompromising examination of urban misery. Her subsequent works of fiction are...

[The] nature of Gabrielle Roy's vision has … cut her off both from her fellow artists and from the popular audience. The typical heroes of Canadian fiction are intellectuals who search loquaciously for their own identity or Canada's, or "superior" observers who smile condescendingly at Canadian manners, or various sorts of crusaders, pioneers and rebels who face life boldly and bring it triumphantly to heel. Gabrielle Roy knows that such exceptional people do exist, but he...

What in effect [Gabrielle Roy tells is] a fairy-tale. In a fairy tale all manner of misfortunes may befall the protagonists, but we know that they are protected by magic talismans…. Her characters are shielded from the encounter with the stalking familiar. They are treated as children not yet capable of venturing into the more sombre areas of existence. Essentially Gabrielle Roy possesses a mother's-eye view of the world. The area of action in which her characters move is limited and condition...

What Gabrielle Roy has … accomplished in La Route d'Altamont is to place together in a close rapport a young and an old person, both of whom express a deep need to communicate and to understand one another. In the four "short stories" that compose what the author has classified as a novel, the reader sees a narrator, Christine, first as an eight-year-old child in her relationships with her eighty-year-old grandmother and then with the eighty-four-year-old Monsieur Sanit-Hilaire, ...