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    The Douglas Notebooks: A Fable
    The Douglas Notebooks: A Fable
    The Douglas Notebooks: A Fable
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    The Douglas Notebooks: A Fable

    By Christine Eddie and Sheila Fischman

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    About this ebook

    An Amazon.ca Best Book of 2013

    Romain was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. At 18, he leaves his family for a home in the forest, learning to live off the land rather than his family's wealth. Éléna flees a house of blood and mayhem, taking refuge in a monastery and later in the rustic village of Rivière-aux-Oies. One day, while walking in the woods, Éléna hears the melody of a clarinet and comes across Romain, who calls himself Starling and whom Éléna later renames Douglas, for the strongest and most spectacular of trees. Later a child named Rose is born. Fade to black. When the story takes up again, Douglas has returned to the forest, Rose is in the village under the care of others, and Éléna is gone.

    From these disparate threads, Christine Eddie tenderly weaves a fable for our time and for all times. As the years pass, the story broadens to capture others in its elegant web — a doctor with a bruised heart, a pharmacist who may be a witch, and a teacher with dark secrets. Together they raise this child with the mysterious heritage, transforming this story into an ode to friendship and family, a sonnet on our relationship with nature, and an elegy to love and passion. The Douglas Notebooks was originally published in French as Les carnets de Douglas. This edition was translated by Sheila Fischman.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGoose Lane Editions
    Release dateFeb 26, 2013
    ISBN9780864927651
    The Douglas Notebooks: A Fable
    Author

    Christine Eddie

    Christine Eddie was born in France, grew up in New Brunswick, and now lives in Quebec. The Douglas Notebooks, her first novel, won the 2008 Prix France-Quebec, the 2009 Prix Senghor du Premier Roman francophone, and the 2010 Prix du Club des Irrésistables.

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    • 4/5
      december 2012 -- this is an odd little book - part fairy tale, part novel. but,,,there's not quite enough magic/magical realism to transport the reader fully into the world eddie has created. another book oozing with potential that was (for me) not quite reached. there were too many dangling moments, or characters that never quite got fully developed. january 2013 -- re-reading for work, before finishing up my review. i have been thinking about this slip of a book a lot since finishing it just after christmas. it had to percolate for a while before i went through it again.beautiful. much, much better on second reading. wonderful translation from sheila fischman, who recently translated kim thúy's Ru.

    Book preview

    The Douglas Notebooks - Christine Eddie

    Even if fought far away, war is always profitable for someone. In Sainte-Palmyre, it was the Bradys. Guided by the smell of a fortune that was hidden at the slightest sign of rationing, they threw themselves into black market foodstuffs, the brewing of beer, and, above all, cooking up deals. Life went on, and before the ink that signed the Armistice was dry, their locomotive was already pulling a tidy fortune put together unbeknownst to the taxman.

    Like a black tide, their power extended over dozens, then hundreds and thousands of hectares. Farms, slaughterhouses, grocery stores, factories, hotels: finally, people stopped counting. Everything that fed the region belonged to them in the end. In Sainte-Palmyre, the Bradys got in the habit of presiding over the table. First the father, then the son, that went without saying.

    Antoine, offspring of the first generation of prosperous Bradys, guaranteed continuation as soon as he’d chosen a wife from among the daughters of prominent citizens: Alexina, a nymphet somewhat neurasthenic but with a substantial bank account. Their wealth secure, Antoine and Alexina had two children, a daughter, May, and — thank God! — a boy three years later. Which authorized the nymphet to sigh wearily when young Romain was introduced to illustrious visitors: This will be my last child. She kept her promise.

    Occupied — he making their assets bear fruit, she tending her depression — the Brady parents had little time to devote to Romain. As for May, the sister, her jealousy was transformed into aversion close to sadism whenever she had a chance to be alone with her brother. It happens.

    Also, their younger son, though perfectly normal, never knew exactly how to behave with his nouveau riche family who kept up relations only if they were public. To the questions Romain asked — naively, timidly, like all children his age — they made no reply, or replied too quickly and off the point. Not now. How can you think such a thing? Will you please keep quiet! The little boy wandered the gleaming corridors of the manor house with its fake turrets; he hid in the folds of the curtains, hands stroking the heavy velvet; he curled up on the landing of the imitation marble stairs that was wide enough to hold two family trees. In the end, he did indeed keep quiet.

    He could have got lost, shut himself away, but for the music that he heard by chance in the kindergarten, and the fact that Monsieur and Madame, thinking it would be polite now and then to offer their guests a recital, agreed to have him take lessons. Then there were the books imported for a small fortune, whole shelves at a time for the sake of appearance, whose pages were sometimes stuck together from never having been read. The real parents of Romain Brady, the only ones who truly mattered, were called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the Comtesse de Ségur.

    Living a four-hour drive from Sainte-Palmyre, Éléna Tavernier too had to be content with an empty childhood. She grew up in a house full of noise, in which the insults hurled by the father at the mother, Rose, along with a plate or a slap, were brimful of obscenity and contempt. Not to hear them demanded considerable effort from the little girl. She spent the better part of her early years with her ears blocked, dreaming that fairies would intervene and transport her and her maman to a land of wonders —any land at all. That was precisely what she’d been doing the last time her mother screamed in the kitchen while a spot of blood was growing into a lake on the floor. If a clue was needed to discover the whole truth, Éléna found it in the dead woman’s terrified expression just before the priest closed her eyes. Denouncing the father, though, was beyond the strength of a child of six.

    Rose Tavernier was buried at the end of the last row in Saint-Lupien’s small graveyard, where Éléna could go only in secret, before school or after Mass, and she never had time to say Maman, I miss you. The only daughter had no choice but to put up with her only father. Like an invisible and peaceful chameleon, apparently obedient but in a constant state of alert, she learned how to tidy, clean, cook, and study while pretending not to be on guard at every moment. Chameleons, as is well known, have a visual field of three hundred and sixty degrees.

    He’s the baker’s son, sighed Antoine Brady to the businessmen passing through the parlour, astonished to see there a child deep in the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. He’s my adoptive brother, May hastened to add to her giggling friends on Sunday, as if to apologize for having to impose on them the scales and arpeggios that were taking over the three floors of the manor. . . . The last child I’ll have, mumbled Alexina, wrapping herself in her cashmere shawl.

    Romain couldn’t stand up straight. Romain waddled like a duck. Romain put his elbows on the table and, more often than not, started fights. Romain was too much this and not enough that. When a word dared to exit his mouth, it disconcerted. It wearied his mother, irritated his father. Awkwardness, foolishness, absent-mindedness. All was Romain’s fault. Even the rain that rotted the crops.

    You’ve got the evil eye, May grumbled into his ear, sinking her nails into the flesh of his arm.

    He did his best to mature, though, by searching for a hidden meaning behind the facts of life. Still, at school, the baker’s son took his place in the middle of the pack, from where he did nothing to draw attention to himself. In company, the adopted son didn’t try to make friends but let himself become the laughingstock of the inhabitants of Sainte-Palmyre, whom he observed without flinching. Very early, however, Alexina’s last child made a decision that he had plenty of time to ripen before he fell asleep at night, counting the pocket money he was saving.

    During the ostentatious ceremony held in honour of his eighteenth birthday, to which were invited handfuls of strangers, Romain surprised his parents by announcing that he was leaving to live in the country for a while. His sister burst out laughing.

    On the morning she would leave Saint-Lupien, Éléna wakened suddenly in an empty house. As often happened, her father hadn’t come home. She took advantage of his absence to set out for school before dawn. Along the way she would stop at the graveyard, where she would place a bouquet of wild violets at the end of the last row.

    Standing in front of her dead mother, her school bag in one hand and the barely open blue flowers in the other, the girl tried to recall a memory that would evoke something gentle and strong from a far-off time when life for the two of them still contained — if her father did them the favour of slipping away — an afterthought of affection. But aside from the fine mist that was dancing on the poorly maintained grass along the paths, nothing showed up.

    The poor-quality tombstone

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