The Immaculate Conception by Gaétan Soucy , Translated by Lazer Lederhendler
Winner of QWF Translation Prize in 2007
East-end Montreal in the mid-1920s. A popular restaurant is razed by an arsonist. Seventy-five people perish in the inferno. While strolling with his wheelchair-ridden father, a man furtively salvages a charred icon from the ruins. He is Remouald Tremblay, a self-effacing bank clerk whose pocket holds a treasured rabbit’s foot and whose memory contains an unspeakable hell.
Gaétan Soucy’s The Immaculate Conception, with its echoes of the writing of Edgar Allan Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky, illuminates the sublime, the uncanny, and the horrific that burns at the core of ordinary lives.
Originally published in 1994 as L’Immaculée conception, this is the novel that established Gaétan Soucy as a powerful new literary force in Quebec.
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