Rue Saint Denis: Fantastic Tales
by André Carpentier
Exstasis Editions, 2001
Reviewed by Aidan Baker
André Carpentier’s RUE SAINT DENIS is a collection of nine gothic tales,
originally written in the late 70s and now published in English translation
(by Leonard Sugden) for the first time. Immediate comparisons can be made to
Edgar Allan Poe and HP Lovecraft, but these stories also contain elements of
fantasy and magic-realism akin to Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia
Marquez. There is a certain arch formality to Carpentier’s prose which
brings to mind the earlier gothic writers. It is primarily in his subject
matters - dream quests, temporal anomalies, arcane knowledge - that he
invokes Latin-American fantasy, although several of the stories, ‘Pevine
Blanc’s Seven Dreams And Reality’ for example, are similar to some of
Lovecraft's dream-cycle stories, such as THE DREAMQUEST OF UNKNOWN KADATH.
None of this is meant to imply that Carpentier’s writing is derivative. Yes,
he is definitely working within a well-established tradition of dark
fantasy. But his contextualization of this tradition within a more
contemporary, and recognizably Québecois, milieu - plus the odd touch of
surrealism - gives his writing a certain originality.
Whether Carpentier is successful as a storyteller, though, I am not so sure.
The stories in RUE SAINT DENIS are not typical fairy tales, with
stereotypical characters and implicit morals, but neither are they
particularly horri- or terrifying. The tales do possess an authentically
gloomy, foreboding atmosphere, but the actual events of the stories are not
particularly frightening.
Generally speaking, the stories are less structured in the standard
chain-of-events/rising-action/climactic way, than stagnant tales built
around a central conceit. The central conceit of ‘Heaven-Sent World Map’,
for example, is that a geographically-perfect simulacra of the world appears
before a man and his grandson. When the man touches the map, he creates
repercussions in the actual world, inadvertently destroying it. That is the
entire plot, pretty much, in one sentence, though the story spans seven
pages. Yes, the story is more concerned with time and how people react to
memories. Which in itself might be interesting, but isn’t particularly
well-entwined (if at all) with the narrative, so rendering the story not all
that readable.
This element of conceit-over-narrative combined with a fairly lugubrious
prose makes RUE SAINT DENIS not the easiest read. The introduction to the
collection remarks that with these stories, Carpentier has "shed heavy
textual excess by adopting...a briefer form." Admittedly, there may be
something lost in the translation, but considering the density of the prose
in these stories, I’m not sure I’d want to tackle Carpentier’s novels.
There are interesting elements in the tales and it is important,
historically-speaking, to consider that Carpentier is credited with
introducing magic-realism to Québecois literature. But what Carpentier wants
these stories to achieve is not precisely clear and that makes them
problematic.
Aidan
Baker is a Toronto-based writer and musician
who has published internationally in such magazines as Intangible,
Stanzas and The Columbia Review.
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