An evening at the opera spills out onto the street and into an odyssey through Montreal by night. The narrator, both innocent and cynical, rushes headlong down what appears to be the road to ruin―or perhaps merely to the loss of his virginity. We follow him from a café called El Cortijo (spanish for a country house with a farm building attached) to a nightclub called the Four Corners of the World. This is an urban metaphor for the classic story of the shrewd country boy bedazzled and led astray by the bright lights of the big city. We discover along with him a burlesque world of transgression and madness, where pleasures are far from simple and love is somewhat less than pure. On the street, as at the opera, passions are on the loose and truth and falsehood leave their marks in the service of the urgencies of desire. Will our hero find love and pleasure after all? This evocative account of his adventure is stamped with the ironic and the affectionate wit and humour that characterize all of Michel Tremblay’s novels and memoirs. Drawing its fiction from many of the autobiographical sketches to be found in Bambi and Me, Twelve Opening Acts and Birth of a Bookworm, and from a collision of the Francophone east and the Anglophone west of Montreal, this novel marks a hiatus between Tremblay’s six-volume Chroniques and his more contemporary novel, The Heart Laid Bare .

Montréal, 1964. Ils sont là, les Gilles Vigneault, Félix Leclerc, Jean-Pierre Ferland, Claude Léveillée, avec leurs chansons qui parlent de l'hiver, du froid, de la nuit et de l'amour. Dans ce Québec qui vit de l'âge d'or des boîtes à chansons, un jeune chanteur beatnik à la beauté du diable fait son apparition et connaît un début de carrière fulgurant. Trente ans plus tard, alcoolique et revenu de tout, il se souvient. Quanrante-quatre minutes, quarante-quatre secondes, c'est la durée non-stop du seul disque qu'aura enregistré François Villeneuve. Dix chansons, dix drames, dix moments marquent la vie d'un homme tourmenté et déçu.

Talonbooks is pleased to announce a new edition of one of Michel Tremblay's most unusual novels. First published in English translation by M&S in 1989 under the title The Heart Laid Bare [Le coeur decouvert, Lemeac, 1986], British and American rights to this novel were sold to Serpent's Tail, who published this same book under a different title, Making Room, which is now out of print. This new Talonbooks edition proudly restores this novel to its rightful place in Tremblay's sweeping and compassionate imagination of human sensibility and passion. Jean-Marc has fallen in love. The object of his affection is Mathieu, a young actor working as a salesman at Eaton's while waiting for his big break. As a dowry to their new relationship, Mathieu brings Sebastien, his son. Jean-Marc, a fusty academic, is not sure about being able to make room in his life for this four-year-old boy. While daring, for some even shocking when it first appeared in the 1980s, this story has, like Tremblay's entire ouevre, stood the test of time and revealed itself to be a work of both enduring and prophetic vision The Heart Laid Bare marks a significant departure for Michel Tremblay, because it is the first of his mature novels which is not set in the semi-autobiographical milieu of his childhood. Yet this thoroughly contemporary love story is told with all the warmth and empathy that is so characteristic of all of his other work.

Mathieu, compagnon de Jean-Marc depuis dix ans, le quitte pour Key West. Là, il découvre ce lieu mythique devenu l'un des mouroirs de l'Amérique. Il apprend à accepter la douleur et à affronter le sentiment de culpabilité qui l'assaille.

French