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, and, in the final story, as a mature woman, desirous of communicating with her seventy-year-old mother. (pp. 457-58)
It is … themes of memory and death which are so vivid to the characters of La Route d'Altamont and which Gabrielle Roy succeeds in rendering so vivid to her own readers.
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