20. Accordéon by Kaie Kellough

This is generally not my genre, but I thought I should get some local canlit read in my life.  This is an experimental "novel" (I think "book" may be more accurate) that is ostensibly about the appearance of the flying canoe in modern-day Montreal.  It is structured in sections of texts, each of which is no more than a page, some even being a single short paragraph.  The text is written by the "author" who is unreliable and whose identity keeps changing.  Next to most of the texts are notes by three editors from the Ministry of Culture who comment on the text and interact with each other.  They represent that benevolent bureaucracy from 20th century Canada with helpful interpretations but also suggesting some authority and rules.

The texts themselves are first person pastiches of all things anglo Montreal.  Reading them was kind of like taking all my quotidien Montreal experiences (including the people I see on the street and in stores and restaurants), blending them all up and re-ordering them into stream of consciousness rants from some guy in front of a Jean Coutu.  There is also the added idea of the Ministry, a department that is attempting to categorize and manage every aspect of Quebec culture.  This was a neat concept, but unfortunately for me, there was no real narrative and after a while I didn't see anything more happening than what was in the first quarter of the book.  Artistically, Accordéon does capture a time and place quite well, this weird limbo we anglophone expats in Montreal inhabit as well as the hauntings of the old Canadian federal bureaucracy.  However, I'm not sure to what end all this was done.