The Road Past Altamont By Gabrielle Roy

First published in French in 1966, The Road Past Altamont pierces to the heart of a child's world, craeting a delicate, yet substantial network of impressions, emotions, and relationships. In her writing, Gabrielle Roy allowed nothing extraneous or false to stand, according to the translator, Joyce Marshall. The literary style of Roy, whose fiction reflects her childhood on the Canadian prairie, has often been compared to that of Willa Cather. 
The Road Past Altamont takes a sensitive French-Canadian girl, Christine, from childhood innocence to maturity. Four connected stories reveal profound moments during her early years in the vastness of Manitoba. Christine's testament to Grandmother's creative power, her great adventure with an old gentleman at Lake Winnipeg and her clandestine one with a crude family of movers, her journey through time and space with aging Maman—all these characters and events convey Gabrielle Roy's preoccupation with childhood and old age, the passage of time and mystery of change, and the artist's relation to the world. The Road Past Altamont

This is a wonderful old-fashioned coming-of-age-themed group of stories about a young francophone girl - her name is Christine - growing up in lonely, windswept, pioneering Manitoba at the turn of the twentieth century.

Her soul is so sensitive and her little life so harrowing at times, that she knows in her heart that she has someday to WRITE about it. Put it ALL out on the table!

For Christine IS the late, greatly-esteemed author - and her own creator - Gabrielle Roy.

I read this book this past summer on our front porch as my wife busied herself with her beautiful flower and veggie garden.

From time to time we’d talk, or greet passing neighbours with a smile and a wave, and then I would once again lazily dip into this sad heart-full-of-soul book - and think how our lives were now so swiftly passing.

My eyesight is growing dim, so the bright sunlight helped my reading enormously.

Already it was August, and in Central Canada we’d only had clement weather since early June. “Eheu, fugace, Postume, Postume!” Alas, the years pass by swiftly, my friend Posthumus (and, oh, what graceful irony there is in Horace’s great poems)!

So I read and read, those cherished and now-lamented late summer days, about Christine’s beloved grandmother, whom Christine’s mother confided was starting to lose it and HAD to come live with them.

A no-nonsense life, that!

And so Mom hauled Christine’s old bewildered Granny to their place one memorable day in early Autumn by trolley, when the first frost was on the apples...

Yes, it’s sad.

But Christine’s young life is also filled with remarkable adventures!

One day an elderly man, who is a stranger to the surprised Christine, is headed on a trip to the Great Sea (our enormous Lake Winnipeg, so perverse with its terrible springtime flooding habits)! And guess what? Christine tags along...

Well, it’s a long way, and of course Mom is frantic with worry - but Christine returns home safely, her head full of dreams.

You see why Roy is one of our greatest storytellers?

Why we’re so proud of her in this Great, still somewhat Uncharted, Northland?

And how every changing mood in Christine, her family, and the strangers she meets - is transmuted into the pure, evocatively plaintive, and nostalgic prose of a master?

You have to read this book, if you love to dwell on somewhat hazy and slightly-sad memories of your long-lost childhood, with all of its novel - and often brutally jarring - experiences of attaining maturity.

And this recent translation does Roy proud.

If you order it, delivery from Canada may be slow - but it’s eminently worth the wait.

And I recommend you do. Paperback Sometimes a strange question rose from within me, as if from the bottom of a well: What are you doing here? Then I would cast my eyes around me. I would try to attach myself to something, familiar to me yesterday, in this world that was fleeing from me. But the troubling sense persisted that I was here only by chance and that I had to discover the place in the world, as yet unknown to me, where I might feel rather more at home. The thought, seemingly so trivial and yet disturbing, accompanied me everywhere: This is over. This is no longer your place. Now you are a stranger here.

Found the story a little dry at times, but it had its striking moments. Overall, the strength of Roy's writing still made it a worthwhile read.

3.5/5 Paperback Four interconnected short stories dripping with melancholy. The narrator is said to be a fictive character from an earlier novel Street of Riches but I haven't read anything else of Gabrielle Roy yet except her most famous work, The Tin Flute.

The first story, My Almighty Grandmother, has the narrator at six years of age. From her eyes we see her old grandmother with her dimming eyesight, failing memory and a host of other infirmities. The girl, her mother and her grandmother: three women of the same bloodline separated by generations. The girl hears her mother ask her grandmother, when the two thought they were alone--When one reaches your age, Maman, what does life seem to be? The old woman answers: A dream, my daughter, not much more than a dream.

The second story, The Old Man and the Child, has the same girl, her grandmother already dead. This is now about an old gentleman neighbor who lives alone by himself, separated from his own kin, and the beautiful Lake Winnipeg (in Manitoba, Canada where Gabrielle Roy was born in 1909) he had seen countless times when he was much younger and how he made it possible for the girl-narrator to see it for the first time.

The third story carries a chess-sounding title, The Move. But no, it's not about my favorite game. It's about going places, the oft-repeated story of the child's mother about her trips on a wagon, across the vast Canadian prairie, in the old days when she was just a child, then the child's own attempt to discover the same joy her mother had, her disillusionment that came afterwards, this terrible distress of the heart. And when she confesses to her mother of what she had done and had found, the mother was in anguish. She knew, one day, her daughter too will leave to find her own place in the world.

The book's title is lifted from the last story, The Road Past Altamont. The narrator is now a full-grown woman and her mother now old like her grandmother in the first story. They now live oceans apart but the daughter has come for a visit. Together, on a trip, they saw--or they thought they saw--the little hills the mother had known as a little girl. And there, seeing her mother painstakingly climb one of these hills with her 70-year-old legs, she asks herself:

...(W)hy is it that a human being knows no greater happiness in old age than to find in himself once more the face he wore as a child? Wouldn't this be rather an infinitely cruel thing? Whence comes the happiness of such an encounter? Perhaps, full of pity for the vanished youthful soul, the aged soul calls to it tenderly across the years, like an echo. 'See,' it says, 'I can still feel what you felt...love what you loved...' And the echo undoubtedly answers something...but what? Paperback The four stories in this short book are connected, not only by the main character at different points in her life, but also thematically with the exploration of change, aging and how we relate to and understand our elders. I feel like this is the kind of book that, were you to re-read it over the years, would reveal very different things each time. I was particularly moved by the second story, The Old Man and the Child, and its combination of journey, the lake and a helping of beach-side philosophy. But the whole book is gentle and sad and sweet and poignant and lyrical. And the translation is excellent. Paperback I gave my mom a matching copy for Mother's Day. I am extremely fond of this book, as it manages to convey mother/daughter relationships in a manner much more poignant than any Lifetime special or copy of Chicken Soup for the Soul (and it's so easy for tales of this kind to devolve into these). Our narrator is reliable, grasping and understanding her own flaws with no concern for making herself unnecessarily sympathetic. And yet she is. Everyone can relate to her moments of youthful capriciousness, and everyone can follow her journey to make meaning of her history. It's difficult to for mothers and daughters to understand each other, but after a lifetime, these two manage. I gave it to my mom as a promise and perhaps a reflection on our own relationship. This book wormed right to my heart, and I couldn't recommend it enough. Paperback

Summary ☆ eBook, PDF or Kindle ePUB ↠ Gabrielle Roy

So this is one of those largely forgotten books that you read and then think, “why the hell aren’t more people reading this”.
It’s more than a coming of age story. It’s about life.
Go find it.
Paperback Great book for intermediate French readers! Some challenging words and turns of phrases, but I still managed to get a clear understanding of the story, and a beautiful story it was! I genuinely looked forward to practicing my French everyday with this book as the cornerstone! Paperback This little 150 page book felt a dozen times longer than so many 800 pagers I’ve devoured. The author refuses to let readers draw their own lessons from the events and instead over-philosophizes absolutely everything. Overwrought, and dull as those endless prairies she discusses. Paperback I took an entire literature course this past semester solely on Gabrielle Roy's works and this was the only book out of the seven we read that I truly enjoyed. The first two stories were my favorite, although, emotionally speaking, they are extremely difficult to read. I couldn't get through either without crying.

I found these short stories to be brutally honest about difficult experiences we all have or will have and to portray the characters as utterly, vulnerably human. Yet Roy also beautifully writes of the personal growth the characters journey through as a result of these events. Paperback Ethereal quality to some of Ms Roy's writing. Excellent wordsmithing. Qualities I enjoy very much.

Set in my home province of Manitoba, Canada, this is one of Ms Roy's classics. Featuring 3 segments of Christine's life - an emotionally evocative childhood stay with her maternal grandmother;
an affirming friendship with an elderly neighbour; reflective adulthood with her aging mother prior to leaving for Paris and the afterward.

Inspired to look for more by Gabrielle Roy.










Canada travelled for GiraffeDays.com

Manitoba Canada location 3/80 for AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 BOOKS Paperback