In the third movement of André Forget’s In the City of Pigs, a young music journalist named Alexander Otkazov takes a walk up Toronto’s Yonge Street to look for a second-hand copy of Goethe’s Faust in Eliot’s Bookshop, which is run by a churlish “dyspeptic Frenchman” with the best of literary intentions (Alex once saw the man turn his nose up at a box of Harry Potter books that a couple from the suburbs tried to sell to him). For the protagonist, the low walls crammed with volumes offer an aesthete’s refuge from “the foundation pits and fluorescent pharmacies” that have scarred the cityscape.
As Alex browses, he reflects on his literary education and casually mentions (to the reader) that the one writer he never tires of is Balzac: “all that sex and scheming.” His affection for La comédie humaine is not a question of intellectual stimulation: “If I was going to spend the evening reading a book,” he says, “I expected to be entertained....
John Delacourt recently received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his story “Liner Notes.”
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