'Trailblazer' Antonine Maillet's Pélagie keeps Bathurst book club absorbed

Antonine Maillet, the New Brunswick novelist and playwright who died in February, "is the great literary matriarch of Acadian literature," says Thomas Hodd, a professor of Atlantic Canadian literature at Université de Moncton.

"People talk all the time about monuments or watershed moments," he said, "and I think one of those moments is the moment of Antonine Maillet herself."

Born in Bouctouche in 1929, Maillet became an award-winning writer who published 17 plays and 20 novels. Her work is a celebration of Acadian language and heritage. 

Her dedication to the Acadian people played a significant role in their cultural growth. At the first World Acadian Congress in 1985, she said,"Acadia needs to say that it exists, that it is part of the francophonie worldwide, and therefore, it has its place in the world — a unique place, just like every other people in the world."

Members of CBC New Brunswick's Books and Backroads book club in Bathurst explored that Acadian identity as part of their discussion about Pélagie: The Return to Acadie by Antonine Maillet, translated by Philip Stratford.

Readers in six small communities in rural parts of the province took part in book clubs as part of CBC's partnership with New Brunswick Public Libraries. 

Pélagie tells the story of an Acadian widow's journey home from Georgia, where she'd toiled in cotton fields for years after the expulsion of Acadians from Atlantic Canada in 1755.

The book's original version, Pélagie-la-Charrette, was awarded the Prix Goncourt, a major literary award in France, when it was published in 1979, making Maillet the award's first non-European recipient. 

Maillet is certainly viewed as something of an icon by Acadians, and members of the book club with Acadian roots said they connected to the book they read.

Judith Boudreau, the Bathurst library assistant who took part in the book club discussion, said Maillet saw the Prix Goncourt as an award for all Acadians. 

She said that Maillet did not just accept it for herself but for all of her people, raising the community up on her shoulders.

LISTEN: Acadian readers say...:

Information Morning - Moncton14:06Books & Backroads in Bathurst

A group of readers in Bathurst reflect on Antonine Maillet's novel Pélagie: The Return to Acadie. Maillet died earlier this year and our book club says while it was a difficult read it was also very rewarding.

Jean–Guy Melanson said Acadie and its history are "in his bones." 

Melanson said for Acadians, story telling is a tradition that has been passed along for generations. "Story-telling is a part of who we are."

He described the translation of the book as "well done", but said he almost gave up reading it partway through. 

He said the English translation was missing words and expressions from the original text. 

 "A lot is lost in translation," he said.

Hodd said this was very valid. "Something's always lost in translation, especially in oral languages like Acadian French. It loses some of that richness." 

But reading the translation can give "a non-Francophone audience… a glimpse into 'other.'"

He also said Maillet "captured self, in a way, is what she tried to do, she tried to articulate self and identity of what it meant to be Acadian, and that's why Pélagie and La Sagouine are so lasting."

Hodd said the 1970s is the decade "that really marks her, in terms of Antonine Maillet's international contribution in putting Acadian literature 'on the map.'" 

Maillet's novel La Sagouine, published in 1971, was Acadie's response to Anne of Green Gables, the L.M. Montgomery book set in Prince Edward Island.

"It became its own kind of mythical place," he said.

Book club members Miranda Angelski and Julia Maury said they found the experience of reading Pélagie: The Return to Acadie rewarding but that the book was not an "easy" read, partly because of Maillet's writing style. 

Story hadn't been told

Marie-Linda Lord, a retired professor from Université de Moncton who specialized in Maillet's work, described Maillet's writing as a "mix of oral and written style" that makes her work unique. She said Maillet's first novel, Pointe-aux-Coques in 1958, was a transition for Acadians from "oral literature to written literature."

Pélagie was significant, Lord said, because Maillet was "the only one who has written that story — the comeback of the Acadian people to the first Acadie in Nova Scotia."

Lord called reading Pélagie "a very physical experience," and said that reproducing the "very slow rhythm, the hard times, and the pain" of the journey was one of the novel's greatest achievements. She compared its style to the writing in Ulysses by James Joyce. 

Maillet was a "literary trailblazer," Hodd said. "Her monuments, as T.S Eliot calls them, were Pélagie and La Sagouine."

When reading her work, "it's such a pleasure to be in the presence of what I can only describe as a real storyteller. You have a real sense of story being offered, not described," Hodd said.

"A key element to that for Antonine Maillet is voice and playfulness and orality, which I think in that sense is a hallmark of these monumental Acadian works is they're rooted in that oral culture."