The Bestiary without lost steps | Ode to Odile

Her mother was raised by cats, writes Odile Tremblay in her Lost bestiarywhich has just been published in Le Boréal. Also, the matriarch’s felines seemed to be entitled to more consideration than her own offspring. Nothing to upset Odile, who adored this whimsical and cultured mother, from whom she inherited a thirst for knowledge, an elegant extravagance and a fascination for “little creatures”.

“We are little animals,” Odile often confided to me, for whom the distinction between animals and human beings is less clear-cut than for the average bear. It’s not just wolves that are carnivorous…

Odile, more than a colleague and a fairy godmother, is a friend, even if we have only been around the cinema for 25 years. “Dear Odile,” Marc-André Lussier wrote to me when she published a subtle and nuanced column, which hit the nail on the head. She left Duty almost a year ago and we miss her every day. I am happy to find the columnist in this thirty inventive, inspired and colorful stories.

Let me be clear: this first book is in no way a “journalist’s work” in the pejorative sense in which it can be understood. Quite the contrary. The writer with her unbridled imagination freed the columnist from what remained of her journalistic shackles. But we reconnect with the unique style, the poetic breath, the eloquence and the erudition of this author who, by her own admission, does not take herself seriously, but does not trifle with literature.

There are distant echoes of Poisson-scorpion by Nicolas Bouvier in this bestiary which provides the backdrop for Odile Tremblay’s numerous travels to the most exotic corners of the planet. The difference is that his short stories are inspired by the true as well as the false, the real as well as the abyss of dreams, memories of his childhood in the Quebec region as well as more or less prolonged stays, from the Amazon to the Indonesia and California to Mauritius.

At the age of 20, she lived in Marrakech for several months, familiarizing herself with the habits and customs of Moroccan merchants. At the same time in Istanbul, she met a Carpathian bear. On her way to Mostar, many years later, she interacted with a giant grasshopper. Then, during an interview with Léo Ferré, a spider on the ceiling advised him to reassure this monument of arachnophobic song, which had become frail far from its base.

Those who know Odile know that she says she is a bit showy around the edges. A beloved witch with her virtual pot full of gris-gris in the shape of lizards, scorpions or spiders. She communicates with animals, in her own way. Globetrotter with telepathic gifts, in a reality that does not have the same limits as mine, and that’s how I like it. “We have the coquetry of our fantasies or the fancies of our coquetry,” she writes. And life seems much more enjoyable to me that way. »

In this Lost bestiarywe find references to Greek mythology and religious fables, to La Fontaine and to Rimbaud, the man with the soles of wind, to Proust and to Melville whose Moby Dickwrites Odile, foreshadowed the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House.

In this short story titled Farewell to the white whalesshe thinks back to the porpoises from her childhood summer vacation, facing L’Isle-aux-Coudres, filmed by Pierre Perrault and Michel Brault in For the rest of the worldsince driven out by water pollution. I recognize there the journalist I met for the first time in the old newsroom of the Dutyalmost 30 years ago, worrying about the future of the planet – and the little creatures that inhabit it – given the scale of the climate crisis.

From the pen of this great lady of criticism, cinematic references are inevitable, from Hitchcock’s birds of misfortune to those of James Bond (the ornithologist, not agent 007) including the plastic pink flamingos of Quebec lawns of yesteryear, which evoke for her Barbie by Greta Gerwig.

In Borneo, Odile observed the antics of an alpha male monkey who looked like Harvey Weinstein. While she was in the Navajo desert, she came across a donkey with sad eyes like those of Bresson’s Balthazar who, she says, begged her to adopt him. Reading that her classmates affectionately nicknamed her “crocodile,” I remembered the sketches of reptiles she left over the years in my notebooks, during press conferences at the Cannes Film Festival.

In this charming Bestiarynicely illustrated by Marie-Hélène St-Michel, I also learned that, like me, Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev was the musical tale of his childhood. At the time, writes Odile, “art seemed much more inspiring to me than real life.” After reading it, I suspect she has not changed her mind.

Odile Tremblay will be signing at the Montreal Book Fair on Friday and Sunday.

Consult the schedule of activities at the Book Fair