Roch Carrier was born to Georges and Marie-Anna Tanguay Carrier on 13 May 1937. His birthplace, the village of Sainte-Justine-de-Dorchester, southeast of Quebec City near the Maine border, is the setting for much of his fiction. His family were...

KEY CONTACTS Hoffmann-La Roche Inc. US Headquarters 340 Kingsland Street Nutley, NJ 07110-1199 Tel: 973-235-5000 Medical information department Tel: 800-526-6367 Fax: 973-562-2390 Return policy information Tel: 800-526-0625 or 973-562-3151 Emergency off-hours Tel:...

The Swiss pharmaceutical firm has impressive new drugs, but does a merger with Novartis lie ahead? Roche is on a roll. Over the last few months the Swiss pharmaceutical company has been riding a rocket called Genentech to renewed respect in the investment...

[A closer look at La Guerre, Yes Sir!] suggests that its wide appeal may come less from a regional social realism than from the universal themes around which Carrier builds his fable, themes as true for Europeans and Americans as for Canadians. Carrier dedicates the novel (which he says he has "dreamed") "to those who have perhaps lived it." The vividness of his treatment of the lives of his Quebec villagers during World War II often resembles the grotesque, slightly enlarged sce...

Roch Carrier's trilogy, of which Is It the Sun, Philibert? is the last part and the newest Dark Age, drives on remorselessly from rural Quebec to the civilization of Montreal, where the real heart of darkness lies. The more leisurely tempo of the earlier novels, with their attenuated nights, slow drives, and long meditations between speech, is now abandoned for the newest rhythm. Those repeated images in La Guerre, Yes Sir! and Floralie are now the mental furniture of young Philibert; they haunt his ...

La Guerre, Yes Sir! and Floralie, Where Are You? are much more alike in mood than Is It The Sun, Philibert? … is to either of the others. The action of the first two covers, in each case, the span of a single rural night. Philibert takes us to the city and compresses months of misery into a brief hundred pages. The first two books are a mordant mixture of desperate joy and surrealist horror, morality plays on the rampage. La Guerre revolves around the funeral and wake of a young soldier, whose union-...