Valentine in Montréal

Don't be fooled by the title. The story is actually very interesting:

My name is Valentine. I am twenty-three years old and I work at a little store at Berri-UQAM métro. I am very ordinary-looking and Barney, who works the same shift as me at the store, says I do not know how to dress. I have have been working there for four years, and I have never missed a day. This is why sometimes I seem familiar to people, even though they can't place me.

Believe me. It gets better.

I found myself at a book fair this past December, hoping to me a former professor and the author of the above book, but things do not always go according to plan. I did speak with and talk with the professor who had a new collection of poetry available, but I did not intend to buy more than one book. And then I heard the author being interviewed on stage...with her daughter!

Arizona O'Neill was the interviewer, and I realized that I had met her before. One of the interesting things about living in this city is how often I have seen certain local and, dare I say it, national celebrities in this cities (I once passed by the singer Martha Wainwright, and I did not bother to stop to ask for an autograph; a friend I have mentioned her before, Billy Mavreas, has been featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for his collections of various knick-knacks). And Arizona? She worked at the infamous Drawn and Quarterly bookstore/publisher (I remembered that she had actually handled an order for me at one point). The talk was interesting; the autographs - combined - were creative; and the book?

Well, let me tell you about that.

It was commissioned by the Montréal Gazette, a local English language newspaper, and divided by chapters named after the various metro stations in the city. And this latter touch was not just an affectation. The locales play very important roles in the story of a girl named Valentine who discovers a doppelganger, gangsters, a wealthy spinster, and maybe - just maybe - love. All this after many years of barely leaving the apartment and the small depanneur (variety store) where she has spent her life.

I was totally taken with this story, and I am glad to note that I have seen fewer and fewer copies available in the bookstores. It is a book that speaks to the city, and I found it wonderful to see how well she describes certain stops that I know so well:

Place-des-Arts:

Barney and I stop and stand on the light blue tiles at Place-des-Arts métro to take a dozen selfies. The tiles are a shade of blue that was popular in the 1960s. You only see it on public transportation now. Men used to wear suits that colour and women had leather shoes and purses of that hue.

Jean-Drapeau:

I get on the yellow line of the métro. It goes under the river and its first stop is Ile Sainte-Hélene, where the amusement park all sorts of other revelry take place. The stop is called Jean-Drapeau and it was built for Expo 67, long before I was born.

Place-Saint-Henri:

We get off at his (Barney's) stop, Place-Saint-Henri. I find there to be something foreboding about the Saint-Henri métro station. The station makes me feel so small. Some métro stations are only a couple of staircases below street level. But some are so deep that you find yourself down where dinosaur bones are buried. The Saint-Henri is down in the belly of the earth. And the red and yellow bricks of its walls rise up to a high arched ceiling. It is as if I am about to be engulfed in flames.

And so on and so forth. This is, I must confess, what I enjoyed most about the book, along with the twisted plot and the illustrations portraying the métro and some of the dreams of the protagonist as she finds herself falling deeper and deeper into the lives around her. I would call it a bildungsroman (look that word up), and I was happy to be taken for this ride.

Find it, read it and enjoy this interesting imaginative map of a life in my adopted hometown.

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You can find more poems, stories, and articles by Kendall Defoe on my Vocal profile. I complain, argue, provoke and create...just like everybody else.

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