Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant Book

This is my favourite book, probably. I've read it six or seven times, mostly in its English translation, once in the idiomatic quebecois French original. Objectively, I know that other books I like are as good as this one, but I love this one the most.

The story takes place over the course of a single day in 1941 in a working class Montreal neighbourhood, and follows a number of characters: three generations of one family, two prostitutes down the road, members of another family, the woman who runs the local shop, the retired high-class prostitute (the "she-wolf of Ottawa") on a neighbouring boulevard, the neighbourhood cat. They get up, go about their day, come across one another, gossip and reveal things about the past… in a deserted house across the street, three fates, Rose, Violette and Mauve, and their mother Florence, knit boots for the children who will be born in the summer… seven women in the neighbourhood are pregnant; all will give birth at once, to a new generation in Quebec. A generation, Tremblay seems to suggest, that has a chance to break free from the repressive culture of Catholicism, ignorance and prejudice that makes everyone's life miserable.

Tremblay came from a similar background to the one he depicts here; in fact, the eponymous fat woman is based on his mother when she was pregnant with him. But it's far from a straightforward autobiographical piece. For one, the author is never born during this story, and there are clearly fictional or fictionalized characters, to say nothing of the light touches of magical realism in the form of the fates and the sentient cat. More than anything, it seems a love letter to a group of people who aren't necessarily deserving of a love letter, which of course makes them wondrously deserving: snarly aunt Albertine, ferocious grandma Victoire, camp and feeble uncle Edouard, weak-willed father Gabriel, the drama-queen Guérin sisters.

In the French original, the book is written in the Montreal dialect of the time, something Tremblay did in many of his plays and novels, determined to shape a new theatre and language for budding Quebec culture in the 60s. This alone caused something of a scandal in his first plays. The joual doesn't come across particularly in the English translation, but Tremblay's skill with character does. Here's Victoire:

She was an exhausted flickering candle, a dismantled gasping clock, a motor at the end of the road, a dog grown too old…a useless old woman, a beaten human being, his grandmother…Richard had heard her curse her daughter and daughter-in-law, cast impotent spells on them; he'd seen her stick out her tongue and pretend to be kicking them. From morning to night, she wandered [the house], a superfluous object of attention in this house where everyone and everything had assigned tasks or at least some use - except for her.

She's a larger than life character, adored by her son and brother but hated by the local shopkeepers:

Françoise, the head waitress, would tell at the drop of a hat about 'the time that crazy bitch Ti'-Moteur ate three butterscotch sundaes and after every one, she told me I'd forgot to serve her and then she left without paying, shouting at the top of her lungs how she'd never set foot again in a place where you wait hours for your sundae and never even get a whiff of it!" That time, in fact, Victoire had realized she'd forgotten her change purse and, too proud to admit it, decided to gain some time…

Her daughter Albertine sleeps in a bed made by her husband as a wedding present:

She had been, and was still, subjected to this bed as to some inevitable catastrophe that might occur long after it has been announced and then go on to mark and direct an entire lifetime: disillusion at the small amount of pleasure - when she had been promised paradise - could be read there just beneath the surface.

The book flicks around between characters (over thirty of them) in short chapter-length paragraphs. Apparently the lack of paragraphs within these is an issue for lots of readers on here. What can I say? It never bothered me. Dialogue seems to tumble out like real speech. Occasionally you need to check back who is speaking but it's not Finnegans Wake.

Despite the somewhat desperate lives of many of the characters, this isn't a miserable book at all. Joy and darkness co-exist. Duplessis the cat risks death crossing a rival dog's territory to see his beloved Marcel, the four-year-old boy who smells like peepee. Béatrice visits her aunt, the retired escort with an amputated leg, with the implicit understanding that she gets a nice lunch and her aunt can reminisce about her glory days. A twelve year old boy confides his troubles to a prostitute in the park, and she feels cleansed by the nobility of his problems compared with those of her clients. It's a celebration of a messy family and a culture on the edge of transformation: hemmed in by religion and bursting at the seams to get out. There's the language question: no one from the neighbourhood goes further downtown than Eaton's: "West of the big store was the great unknown: English, money, Simpson's, Ogilvy's, la rue Peel, la rue Guy." There's politics - Quebec has voted against going to war in Europe: "France! France abandoned us. France sold us down the river. Save France so it can go on shitting on our faces afterwards, and laugh at the way we talk and think they're better than us?… I don't want to die for France and I don't want to die for Canada either! And I sure as hell don't want to die for England!" But this is spoken by a defensive man, terrified that others think he has gotten his wife pregnant to avoid the draft.

There's no plot to speak of. It's just characterization, setting, ideas and set pieces, and personal mythology made national. Near the end of the book a character tells explicitly mythological tales to a group who all take it differently. The fat woman loves the "mixture of true and false, of humdrum life and her own astonishing need for illusions and the marvellous." I identify strongly with the fat woman in this need; it might be the reason I read, it is certainly why this book resonates so strongly with me.

"And how about you, Laura? How can you tell when your father's stringing you a line and when he's telling the truth?" Laura stopped drying the dishes and seemed lost in thought. When she did speak, it was with conviction: "I don't really care, ma tante. In fact, I think sometimes it even helps me get on with my life, the way he spins his yarns." Albertine plunged her hands into the boiling water. "Bon, okay. I get it. I'm the one that's crazy. Go ahead and dream, the whole bunch of you."