In the heart of the Latin Quarter, meeting place of marginal characters of all sorts, Céline Poulin works the night shift at a cheap and popular restaurant, Le Sélect, serving hamburger platters and spaghetti and meatballs to student misfits, transvestites, hookers and queens from the Main―Montreal’s disreputable Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Hanging out with a theatre company in her off hours, Céline sees opening before her a world where it is not only possible, but even desirable to pretend. When the director offers her a role in The Trojan Women, the die is cast. The Black Notebook is Céline’s diary, her account of her trials and tribulations, her expectations and her cruel disappointments, because this young waitress at Le Sélect has her own dramatic story to tell, even if only to Céline is a midget. From the theatre of Euripides to the theatre of Montreal’s Main, Michel Tremblay―our Balzac―creates and gives voice to some astonishing new characters in this first of a new series of novels. For the characters of The Black Notebook, the first in this trilogy, life is a comedy that barely conceals the cruel and pitiless tragedy of the everyday. With a transcendent eloquence and compassion, Michel Tremblay celebrates how it is possible for Céline to embrace her difference and to flourish―despite that difference, or perhaps, because of it.

It’s 1967. Change is everywhere in the air. The Quebec independence movement has been endorsed by Charles de Gaulle's famous “Vive le Québec libre!” and things will never be the same. But unlike the Plateau novels, wherein Michel Tremblay's beloved characters are seen from the perspective of a child destined to discover the defining characteristic of his own otherness as gay, the Notebooks are narrated in the voice of a young woman, one whose difference is defined by her highly visible physical deformity—Céline Poulin is a midget. Having always maintained that he does not write politics, but fables, Tremblay here celebrates how it is possible for Céline to embrace her difference and to flourish in a community of others with transcendent eloquence and compassion. This is the second novel in Tremblay’s Notebooks series.

When Fine Dumas’s notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down after Expo 67, Celine is condemned to go back to working as a waitress at the Select, attending to the frustrated appetites and exquisite pathos of its exotic clientele. Then a newcomer appears, the gorgeous Gilbert Forget, a musician who is not insensitive to her charms. Celine, a midget who has always thought she was unworthy, never having imagined the possibility of a mature loving and sexual relationship in her life, throws herself into a passionate affair with Gilbert, discovering the body’s thrills for the first time. Hanging out with his new crowd of artists and performers, she gets a backstage look at a project that’s going to revolutionize Quebec show business and become emblematic of its 1960s culture. As she has done twice before, Celine records the events and adventures of her life in a notebook. But now, inspired by the agony and ecstasy of first love, she reaches for the heights of romantic prose: while The Black Notebook, her first, is a simple daily journal; and The Red Notebook, her second, is a memory book, in which she records her life in retrospect embellished with rhetorical commentary; in The Blue Notebook Celine steps outside of herself, using a narrator to tell her story. Having finally discovered herself, she is now also finally free of that self. Will her tempestuous relationship with Gilbert endure? Will there be a fourth installment?