Quebec writer Pan Bouyoucas is not widely known in English-speaking Canada, but he is a Governor General’s nominee for novels written in French, and published in Quebec and France. The Man Who Wanted to Drink Up the Sea is his first foray into writing fiction directly in English.
The Man Who Wanted to Drink Up the Sea tells the peculiar story of Lucas, a 58-year-old Montreal restaurateur who begins to be visited in his dreams by his adolescent lost love, a girl named Zephira. She is so tantalizing and mysterious that he feels compelled to look her up again, but is disappointed to discover that she has died.
But Lucas has been seized by a powerful obsession. He becomes pale and haggard, and finally asks a patron of the restaurant, an anthropologist named Judy Yamada, about the land of dreams. Worldwide, she explains, people believed that the land of dreams was an intermediary place, one where the dead could meet the living. Lucas therefore...
Antanas Sileika’s 2004 novel, Woman in Bronze (Random House), was set in jazz-era Paris. His most recent novel, Underground, was released by Thomas Allen in 2011. He is the director of the Humber School for Writers.
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