Germaine Guèvremont has been acclaimed for her lyrical and naturalistic treatment of the habitants who lived amid the islands and inlets of the St. Lawrence River near Sorel, Quebec. By some critics she is regarded as the last of the older generation of Quebec novelists who took a nostalgic view of rural existence. Yet Guèvremont was keenly aware that the old way of life was in decay, an awareness she conveyed through her use of an underlying irony and through her creation of the figure of the disruptive stranger, a boisterous symbol of the new attitudes that sought entry into the closed world of Quebec village life. Coincidentally in 1945, as Guèvremont was publishing Le Survenant, one of the last in the tradition of the novels of the soil, another Quebec writer, Gabrielle Roy, produced Bonheur d'occasion, one of the first of the...