Mercury Under My Tongue
by Sylvain Trudel
translated by Sheila Fischman
Soft Skull, 2008

Reviewed from advance galley by Nathaniel G. Moore

Born in Montreal in 1963, Sylvain Trudel is a Quebecois writer who studied science and cinema before turning to writing full time in 1985. The author of six novels for adults, Mercury Under My Tongue is the fourth and the most widely translated. His most recent work La mer de la Tranquillité, won the 2007 Governor General’s Literary Award. Trudel has also written books for young people.

His translator for this edition is Sheila Fischman, who won the 1998 Governor General’s Literary Award for translating Michel Tremblay’s Les Vues Animées, Bambi & Me). Fischman has worked with more than 100 Quebec novelists including Anne Hebert, Jacques Poulin, Marie-Claire Blais, and Yves Beauchemin. Fischman is also the member of the Order of Canada (2000) and a founding member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada.

Mercury Under My Tongue is the story of Frederick Langlois, a 17-year old boy dying of bone cancer in a hospital. Describing a real youth is Trudel’s gift, or at least, the youth imagined for Frederick. A marvellous voice for a marvellous little life, Frederick breaks down the typical barriers of the parent/child edifice and recasts the dynamic with stronger mutual reasonability as Frederick’s inner-gauges fire off meaningful calibrations of emotional love and understanding. 

Though young, Frederick is world-weary, and his heart is bursting with energy, taking the stage in the form of an impassionate auto-eulogy. The language and turn of phrases is fortified by Frederick’s desire to see beyond his bed sick wake-in-waiting, and work through his jaded mindset into a more optimistic outlook, despite his illness.

"Yes, papa, life is as simple as hello and as complicated as a farewell, but in the secrecy of my silence and the silence of my secret, I love your feverish, abnormal soul."

In this task of discovery, Frederick tries to reach temporary hope. "Oh no, mama, you aren’t disturbing me, you never disturb me. I wasn’t doing anything: only thinking. I tell her that I’m tired and in the mood to not like anyone today, that anyone else, I’d tell to come back another time, but with her it’s different. I come from her directly from heaven, as if it were a tunnel inside her, and she has all ancestral rights over me; what I like though is that she never aspires to be a godsend."

While Frederick attempts to communicate with those closest to him, he discovers life lessons he’ll never use, but discovers them quickly from within the confines of his sickness and lovingly leans on those around him in honesty and moody passion. Perhaps its Frederick’s passion and verve in delivering these inner insights that makes him likeable, facing the fact the cards have in fact been dealt, he begins to fuse a cold objectivity into his emotional state, accruing more honour than empathy in the process.

"It’s unreal to see all these Christmas visitors turn up in the middle of September, the month of dead leaves, wild ducks, and chokecherries. They don’t coincide with any known imagine and they move like smoke in their rain boots or in the bad family movie. Unless I’m the surprise baby Jesus this year...But who knows: maybe a baby Jesus is born on Earth every day and another dies right away in the night, on the other side of the world, so that nobody’s jealous, so that every nation thinks they’re the chosen people and keeps churning out bibles. No, we never know anything about anything, but while we wait it’s pissing rain outside and that disinfects the world."

Trudel is able to work within the framework of Frederick’s immediacy, the reader is at his side, witnessing first hand his plight, almost smell the personal aroma of his mortality play winding down. Above all, Frederick is dedicated to all of life, there is a sense that after he is gone, he will continue and develop this line of thought until the end of time.

It is in these revelations the reader discovers Fredericks’ voice is a memorable lightening rod of emotional clarity and passion as he negotiates a calm desperation, and surrender, like a phoenix escaping life in one long breath before finally crashing in fevered poetry that does more enlightening than dazzling in descent.