[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-...

They Won't Demolish Me! is not only a fantastic farce full of the most extraordinary comic invention. It deals with more than the funny antics of a group of oddballs who seem to be living through a never ending naughty childhood. This comedy is just one of the many levels on which the book moves, and it is a level which is firmly rooted in the serious. "They" of the title are the developers, of course, the big guys, the capitalists, the faceless bosses who never appear. Ever expanding, ...

Floralie, où es-tu, filled with boisterous, ribald humour and stylistic fireworks, is another impressive accomplishment—a genuine relief from the agonized, novel-escaped-from-the-confessional-booth trend in contemporary French-Canadian writing. In more ways than one, however, Floralie is a step backward. La Guerre, yes sir centres around the return of the body of a soldier killed in the war to his native village in rural Quebec. Floralie moves even farther into the past and describes the weddi...

La Guerre, Yes Sir! is a first novel of staggering sophistication and control, proving that there now exists in Montreal a major international writer…. [In] the course of a few pages Roch Carrier has succeeded in portraying with memorable vividness all the frustrations the Quebec rural proletariat suffered at the hands of its two rulers: an incomprehensible Catholic God who dominated their spiritual lives, and the hated English ('maudits Anglais') who have forced French Canadians to fig...

The point of view in Roch Carrier's brilliant sixth novel [Il n'y a pas de pays sans grand-père] is that of Vieux-Thomas, once a vigorous man, now in his seventies and restricted to a rocking chair by his own family. Refused all freedom in his own house, he is left to musing about his past. However poignant Vieux-Thomas's situation may be, it soon becomes clear that this is not only a perceptive novel about the pain of old age, but that it carries a powerful political message as ...