Readopolis

by Bertrand Laverdure, Oana Avasilichioaei

Overview

From award-winning writer Bertrand Laverdure comes Readopolis, a novel translated by Oana Avasilichioaei.

It's 2006 and down-and-out protagonist Ghislain works as a reader for a publishing house in Montreal. He's bored with all the wannabe writers who are determined to leave a trace of their passage on earth with their feeble attempts at literary arts. Obsessed by literature and its future (or lack thereof), he reads everything he can in order to translate reality into the literary delirium that is Readopolis--a world imagined out of Chicago and Montreal, with few inhabitants, a convenience store, a parrot, and all kinds of dialogues running amok: cinematic, epistolary, theatrical, and Socratic.

In the pages of Readopolis, Laverdure playfully examines the idea that human beings are more connected by their reading abilities than by anything else. Funny and sardonic, whimsical and tragic, this postmodern novel with touches of David Foster Wallace and Raymond Queneau portrays the global village of readers that the Internet created, even before the 2.0 revolution.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771662994
Publisher:	Book*hug Press
Publication date:	04/27/2017
Series:	Literature in Translation Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	254
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

BERTRAND LAVERDURE is the author of six novels, including Universal Bureau of Copyrights and Readopolis (winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation), both translated by Oana Avasilichioaei. His many poetry publications include Cascadeuse and Sept et demi. He was awarded the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts (1999) and the Rina Lasnier Prize for Poetry (2003) for Les forêts. He was a literary chronicler on MAtv and CIBL Radio, and Poet Laureate of Montreal from 2015 to 2017.

OANA AVASILICHIOAEI is a Montreal-based poet, translator, and artist. She is the author of many books, including Expeditions of a Chimaera (with Erín Moure; 2009), We, Beasts (2012; winner of the A.M. Klein Prize for Poetry) and Limbinal (2015). Previous translations include Suzanne Leblanc's The Thought House of Philippa (co-translated with Ingrid Pam Dick; 2015), Catherine Lalonde’s The Faerie Devouring (winner of the 2018 Cole Foundation Prize for Translation), three books by Bertrand Laverdure, including Universal Bureau of Copyrights (finalist for the 2015 ReLit Award, Readopolis (winner of the 2017 Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation), and The Neptune Room (finalist for the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for Translation).

Editorial Reviews

07/31/2017
Laverdure (Lectodôme) centers this extremely funny novel on Ghislain, a poorly paid reader for a publishing house, who’s working at a Montreal dépanneur (convenience store) to “honour his obligations as a tenant and small pleasures as a cultural consumer.” He feels superior to most writers he has to read but admires anyone who can finish writing a book. Books—reading and thinking about reading—are his life; Readopolis is an imaginary state (in both senses of the word) that he enters through reading and through connections with other readers. The novel contains multitudes: ongoing dialogues between different characters, ranging from the banal to the intensely philosophical; a fictional parrot that crashes the plot; reflections on the pyramid scheme of the contemporary education industry; a plethora of literary and cultural references; and illuminating meditative analyses on convenience stores as object lessons in consumer capitalism. This is a book for book lovers, particularly anyone who feels a flare of recognition when Ghislain, asked why he continues to slog his guts out in the arts world when he is “only symbolically remunerated,” answers thus: “I’m stubborn.... People feel less sorry for me when I tell them, ‘I’m not rich, but at least I work in my field.’ ” (May)

Publishers Weekly