Joual de vivre

Over a career spanning seven decades, Michel Tremblay has often turned to his past for inspiration. Novels and plays set in the Plateau Mont-Royal or depicting French Canadian migration from the prairies to Montreal are loosely based on his own family’s history. Except for a few works of non-fiction, which are more explicitly autobiographical, such as Un ange cornu avec des ailes de tôle (A horned angel with wings of sheet-metal), from 1994, Tremblay has largely drawn upon material at hand to create his works of fiction and theatre. Recently, however, we see a shift in the way he contemplates his past. The non-fictional Paris en vrac (Paris in bulk) and the play Hosanna ou La Shéhérazade des pauvres (Hosanna or the Scheherazade of the poor) give the impression that Tremblay, born in 1942, is reviewing what he has written, whom he has interacted with, and the trajectory that has led him to become one of Quebec’s foremost cultural icons.

The...