The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant

In a recent three-week stay in Quebec, it seemed as if every second person I met mentioned this work. So I bought it (in French), expecting to find it rather hard going, but feeling a vague obligation to figure out what all the fuss was about. The sense of obligation disappeared about three pages in, and I was hooked. During World War II, seven women in a working class, French-speaking quarter of Montreal are pregnant and due to deliver their children within a month. One of these women is the Fat Woman of the title, whose life and that of her chaotic three-generation household form the center of this novel and of the succeeding five novels of Michel Tremblay's "Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal" series. As the novel unfolds in the course of one Saturday in May, we are introduced bit by bit to the lives of these women, their families, and their neighbors. What a wonderful tapestry of lives this is! There is humor; there is magic; there is sadness and suffering. I fell in love, and have been boring friends and family with recommendations to read this work. Tremblay's affection for his characters shines through without blinding him to their manifest shortcomings and flaws. If you loved Olive Kitteridge: Fiction, consider putting this novel on your reading list.

I have been traveling to Montreal very often for the last 8 years. Intrigued by its unique north american culture and history it was inevitable I would venture into its literature. The Francophone culture survival in an economically (and political) Anglophone dominated continent is of special interest to me. I live in northamerica and in Montreal I am an "allophone"; (nor French or English native speaker). Few voices have spoken so eloquently about the culture and issues regarding French Canada as Michel Tremblay. The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant is an incredible novel. A must read for urban literature lovers and a window into our French neighbors to the north. His plays and other books, including Some Night my Prince will come are a revelation. An incredible writer, sadly "out of the radar" in the English speaking world.

You want to learn more about Montreal and that funny province to the north ? Now that you've read Richler, you want to get the other side of the picture, the French side ? Then Tremblay's "Fat Woman" is the best place to start. A great novel by Quebec's most famous writer and best (and only) shot at the Nobel prize of literature.