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The Bibliophile: What A Publisher Does

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Over the years, whenever I’ve been asked what it is exactly a publisher does, I’ve had a range of answers, depending on how I’m thinking about my role and function at the time. Of late, I’ve described myself as a professional enthusiast. Enthusiasm is probably the state that most links publishing and bookselling for me: finding that book that I can get behind and trumpet into the hands of readers as loudly and as confidently and generously as I can. I take immense pleasure in the discovery of a new (or new-to-me) writer, and in the ability to engender in others that same anticipation and pleasure.

It’s perhaps for this reason that I listen so much to booksellers, and trust them more than I do academics and critics: they still read as I do, or at least as I try to do: for pleasure, excitement, the feeling of quickening when something unexpectedly connects or opens with the turn of the page. I listen to them about what I should be reading (if I could ever get out from under the manuscript pile), but also, just as much, what we should be thinking about publishing. Booksellers have turned me on to several of my favourite Biblioasis authors, and I’m grateful for it.

Photo: May Our Joy Endure, Querelle of Roberval, and You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kev Lambert.

It was in 2018 or 2019, at the Salon des Livres that one such bookseller urged me to look at the work of Kev Lambert. It bothers me that I can’t remember his name at this time, nor even the bookstore he worked at: it was a French language bookstore in Quebec City, and he was there working the Salon for a couple of publishers. During a break he took me by the arm and guided me to a couple of publisher’s booths, including Heliotrope’s, picking up Kev’s just-released Tu aimeras ce que tu a tué. Kev, he told me, was the most original and fearless author to come out of Quebec in at least a generation, and that if this book was anything to go by was a writer we should commit to early. His enthusiasm was contagious, so I sent it immediately to my most trusted reader, who sent me one of the most enthusiastic (and strangest) reader reports I’ve ever had the pleasure to receive. Below: a short excerpt:

Well, I’m rather glad you don’t have to run books by a corporate publishing committee, because I have no idea how to explain this book cogently, let alone come up with a one-line pitch, but I one hundred per cent think you should buy it. Essentially it’s a gay coming-of-age in which the narrator may or may not be a ghost, and lots of children die, who may or may not come back as ghosts. And it’s the funniest, weirdest thing I’ve read for a long time…..It’s The Returned [if that French TV series about dead children coming back to their village made Canadian shores; it became a cult hit in Britain] meets Clerks meets… [hmmm, this is nothing like Houellebecq but it would definitely appeal to people who love Houellebecq]. It’s so weird I’m struggling to come up with book comparisons, it often reads like a film. … And, bloody hell, this guy has written, at 25, one of the most original things I’ve read for quite a while.

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Translation is, for me, as a monoglot (my kids so regularly tell me that I speak country French that I now no longer try to speak it at all), an act of faith, especially faith in the readers and publishers I’ve come to trust. So we took a leap and published Kevin’s first book, and when I read it in Donald Winkler’s excellent translation (You Will Love What You Have Killed) I had to agree both with my bookseller guide and first reader: this was one of the most strangely original things I’d read. It was like the revenge of the Gashlycrumb Tinies (A is for Amy who fell down the stairs / B is for Basil assaulted by bears). This was a violent, comic, tragic, and lyrical world quite unlike any other. Their next novel, Querelle of Roberval, upped the ante: a novel of a labour strike in a Quebec milltown, it read like a Greek tragedy, ending with infanticide and the striking workers quite literally preparing to eat their rich bosses. It caused a furor in France where it won the de Sade Prize and was shortlisted for the Medici, and in English the Writer’s Trust prize, again in Donald Winkler’s inestimable translation.

This brings me to their third novel May Our Joy Endure, which was published earlier this month, and defies every expectation set by their first couple, beyond, that is, its breathtaking originality. The French version was a sensation, was a Goncourt finalist, and won the Médici and a range of other key awards. Kev has told me that they consider this exploration of the lives of the ultrarich their most violent novel to date, but it is a much more nuanced violence, and because of that so much more unsettling. “Writing Querelle left me with this big question about bosses and the rich,” Lambert told Steven Beattie in an interview for Quill & Quire. “My idea was to try and see the people who were invisible in Querelle. It made sense for me in a social way, because really rich people don’t want to be seen. They don’t want us to see how they live, where they live, what their day-to-day lives can look like.” But he also chose to approach these characters and their situations with as much empathy as possible. “I wanted to challenge the idea that humanizing the person you critique is giving them credit,” Lambert told Beattie. “We hear this sometimes in political or media circles. But I think it’s a fake or a wrong idea.”

This is only one of the things that makes May Our Joy Endure such an important book, and in the words of another reviewer, André Forget in The Walrus, “reveals Lambert to be one of our most subtle and perceptive novelists.” Calling the book “gorgeous, lyrical, and tender—a ballet performed in an abattoir,” Forget explains as well as anyone why Kev Lambert is so essential, and so refreshing in this hyper-politicized literary moment: they eschew playing it safe, pat answers and solutions, which also explains why it is that Biblioasis will continue to follow them anywhere.

Dan Wells
Publisher

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The Bibliophile: May You Enjoy Your Stuff

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Lots of exercises are tricky: distinguishing your backlist from your frontlist; packing up your life and moving to another city; burpees. In last week’s newsletter, Vanessa helped with the first item. This week, I plan to help with the second. May god help you with the third.

I have had at least seven different mailing addresses across three cities over the last ten years. It might not be surprising then that I’ve become proficient at packing my life into boxes and bags and have completely given up on owning hangable artwork (I get tattoos now). To clarify, I never set out to be a digital nomad or minimalist. My circumstances have dictated that I choose which physical things to own very carefully. Having (approximately) exactly what you need makes the packing and moving process a lot less painful than it otherwise would be. You don’t want to trip while you’re carrying a box of deteriorating Teflon non-stick pans down a winding staircase (true story).

Photo: You can pick up a copy of May Our Joy Endure September 3, 2024.

These days, I tend to only keep material goods that bring a high degree of utility and aesthetic value to my life. The mugs that I own, for instance, are all different sizes and represent my various interests from wabi-sabi interior design to Star Wars. I also tend to only keep books I would re-read, find beautiful to look at, and are comfortable to hold. Until our author interview with Kev Lambert, I hadn’t paid too much conscious attention to what these items say about me. Kev, by the way, is the author of Que Notre Joie Demeure, a runaway bestseller that was shortlisted for the 2023 Goncourt Prize, and won the 2023 Médicis Prize (making Kev the first Canadian writer in a couple of generations to win this most prestigious of French awards). Donald Winkler’s translation into English, May Our Joy Endure will be available September 3, 2024. The novel transports readers into the lives of the ultra-privileged, primarily following Céline Wachowski, an internationally renowned architect who is accused of destroying struggling neighborhoods in Montreal with her plans for a newly commissioned project—the Webuy Complex. In a time of widening wealth disparity and rising costs of living, Céline’s depicted lavish lifestyle is simultaneously alluring and terrible. When we asked about their intentions behind these details in May Our Joy Endure, Kev shared some nice food for thought about our relationship to material things:

Q:

Let’s talk about the stuff in this novel, from the fashion (Comme des Garçons, Vivienne Westwood and Marie St. Pierre), to the books (from Lacan, to Tremblay, to Proust), to the wine, (they don’t drink white, they drink Sancerre), to the architectural materials (one of the characters has Corten Steel on the front door of his house which is beautiful but he fears was too trendy and is now dated). This is a novel about material culture that is very detailed in terms of what our culture is made of and how it is all put together. Why are these details important to both the novel’s aesthetic and its ambivalent perspective on cultural “makers” to use an ascendant if dubious term.

A:

There’s a sociological aspect to these decisions: these are all signs of distinction. Céline is ultra-rich but she doesn’t see herself as vulgar. Even if Céline is, in fact, nouveau riche because her money isn’t old, she certainly doesn’t want to be seen as nouveau riche, because she wants to be seen as a kind of radical aesthetic figure of the avant-garde. She has to communicate this in her style. She couldn’t wear Chanel because it’s too conservative and classic. So there’s an aspect of the referentiality that is character development. While I’m critical of these objects that are completely caught up in a capitalist culture of consumerism, there are still brilliant people who have thought about these clothes in an aesthetic way. You don’t need to own the object to see it and to understand its value. These materials in the novel also operate as a kind of intertextuality—the fashion designers the characters wear, the art on their walls, the food they eat, the opening nights they attend, it’s never insignificant. It’s a way of winking at the reader, of encouraging them to gain some critical distance from the world of Céline and of the novel at one moment and of pulling them in closer the next.

Photo: Kev’s Biblioasis books May Our Joy Endure, Querelle of Roberval, and You Will Love What You Have Killed.

So, as it is at the conclusion of a move, there seems to be much to unpack in May Our Joy Endure. The things we own might be valuable insofar as they: help us do things, mean something to us, and reflect us back into the world. To make matters more complex, this value might change over time as when our phone batteries die and cease to function (thanks to planned obsolescence) or when you can suddenly pull a leopard print coat from the back of your closet to look cool on a night out (thanks to the trending ‘mob wife aesthetic’). And presumably, we tend to hold onto our valuables and are more willing to let go of the less valuable. Quick—you can only grab three things on your way out of your burning home—what are you rescuing? The exercise of moving homes forces you to entertain a less intense version of this thought experiment, though it still confronts you about your relationship to everything you own.

Unlike the nouveau riche characters in May Our Joy Endure, I have grown into the habit of gently decluttering regularly and being very slow to purchase or borrow new-to-me things. My turnover of things has decreased, which in turn, has increased my awareness and appreciation for the things I have. It just so happens that this also reduces the stress associated with packing up your life and moving onto your next chapter since you already have a good idea of what to bring.

Julia Lei
Publicist

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