The Red Notebook

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.