A Simple Love Story #1 - The fire

Louise Tremblay d'Essiambre is the best-selling author in Quebec. She has written over 50 of them, and they have sold over 2.5 million copies.

Yes, it's crazy. Especially since I had never heard of her. It was time for me to make a good Quebecoise of myself. And since I didn't know anything about these novels, I picked up the first volume of the series with the least evocative title possible: A Simple Love Story.

Summary

Marie-Thérèse and Jacquelin Lafrance, parents of six children in a Quebec village in the 1920s, have experienced a great misfortune: their house has been completely destroyed by fire, along with Jacquelin's shoemaking business. Fortunately, no one died, but now they had to find a way to ensure the family's survival. Jacquelin decided to go to work in construction sites to collect some money while Marie-Thérèse worked on the reconstruction of the house. Unfortunately, the fire was not the last misfortune to befall the family...

Impressions

I have a rather favorable bias towards extremely popular novels. The plot is often incredibly gripping and you find yourself reading them feverishly, whether your ego approves or not. For example, I really enjoyed A Good Woman by Danielle Steel, a kind of Louise Tremblay d'Essiambre on speed.

That's why when I started A Simple Love Story, I was a little confused. The most dramatic event in the book, the fire, happens before the story even begins. So, basically, it's the story of a couple working to rebuild a house. Yes, it's hard, but not that hard either. Marie-Thérèse has the support of her aunt, who offers her a place to live in the meantime, and the reconstruction goes smoothly. When Jacquelin goes to work at the construction site, it is crystal clear that something is going to happen. He has no choice, otherwise the story would be boring as hell. And indeed, Jacquelin gets hurt. But he doesn't die, and he will eventually get his life back. In short, I don't give the plot many points.

On the style side, nothing phenomenal either. The sentences are very simple, subject-verb-complement. But that I can understand: when you write 1000 words a day, you don't have the leisure to chisel each sentence. The dialogues in joual are amusing, but there again, nothing new under the sun.

What fascinated me the most was the complete lack of innuendo. This is probably the book that has required the least amount of thought from me since, seriously, my childhood. Everything, absolutely everything, is explicit. You know at all times what is going on in each character's head. When someone says something a little surprising, you don't have time to wonder what their motives were: the explanation is in the next sentence. It's a little confusing. I have read that the interiority of the characters was one of the things that made Louise Tremblay d'Essiambre so beloved. But for my part, I like it when my intelligence is trusted a little more.

I think it's needless to say that I won't be reading subsequent volumes in the series, but I'm glad I checked this item off my list.