Sacre Blues: An Unsentimental Journey Through Quebec

About this book

Winner of the 2000 Quebec Writers Federation First Book Award and the Mavis Gallant Prize for Nonfiction A hip enlightening portrait of a place most Canadians find baffling: Quebec without the politics. Why do three million Quebecers tune in the same absurd sitcom every week? How did they get the nickname "pepsis"? Why does Celine Dion put on a down-home accent when she returns to her home province? For referendum-weary English Canadians Quebec is an enigma wrapped in a yawn. Taras Grescoe treats the province as an exotic destination. He takes readers onto the shuffleboard courts of Florida to a francophone country-and-western festival in rural Mauricie to the caf tables of expatriate Quebecers in Paris. He deconstructs a Montreal Canadiens hockey game explores the stunning diversity of Quebecs newspapers and dismantles Bombardier snowmobiles. En route he meets Mohawk Warriors Yiddish-speaking French Canadians and the UFO-obsessed followers of Ral. Informed and incisive Sacr Blues explores the heart of contemporary Quebec: its love-hate relationship with France and the United States; the dance theatre and literary productions celebrated in Europe but little known here; its fears about distinctness on an increasingly uniform continent. Along the way we meet such Quebec residents as the playwright Michel Tremblay and the novelist Neil Bissoondath Teleglobe CEO Charles Sirois and the arctic explorer Bernard Voyer the foul-mouthed columnist Pierre Foglia and the esteemed philosopher Charles Taylor. Sacr Blues serves up a spicy irreverent inside view of this unique and little-known part of North America. With side orders of poutine maple syrup and Vachon snack cakes. And scarcely a mention of Lucien Bouchard. From the Hardcover edition.