[.ca] Moncton Mantra (ISBN 1550711369)

Amazon.ca:
Moncton Mantra, an autobiographical novel by award-winning Acadian poet Gérald Leblanc, is a curious work, half political salvo and half bohemian chronicle. Leblanc writes about Moncton's community of artists and writers with fervent optimism and great conviction, reminiscing about the early 1970s in the familiar terms of experimentation with sex, drugs, and ideas. Leblanc's hero, Alain Gautreau, is an Acadian nationalist, an ambitious but unproven poet, and an unassumingly comfortable homosexual. He drops in and out of university, falls in love a few times, and actively participates in Acadia's budding artistic scene, struggling to balance his artist's individualism with his membership in a vibrant but perpetually threatened minority culture. Reading Moncton Mantra in translation is a particularly problematic venture. Beyond the usual losses inherent in translation (which can generally be compensated for by an inventive translator), Moncton Mantra is so concerned with the French language, chiac (Acadian slang), and the status of francophonie within North America, that its very existence in plain English, shorn of any regionalism, seriously undermines the text's political effectiveness. But that same paradox, of a tiny, isolated, nationalist artistic community attempting to participate fully in global culture, with characters who boost Acadian poets while listening to American rock & roll, is also what elevates the novel above its otherwise modest nature as a work of belated beat-hippie nostalgia. --Jack Illingworth