Un Ange cornu avec des ailes de tole.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara

Un Ange cornu is a book for people who love to read - not for scholars and critics who dissect texts, but for people who love to sink their teeth into a juicy plot and find out what happens next.

In this delightful, tender memoir, Michel Tremblay, one of Canada's most highly respected writers, recalls growing up in a poor, French-speaking family in Montreal and how he came to cherish books. The author's grandmother, an uneducated farm woman transplanted to the city, and his perpetually exhausted, overweight mother find refuge in fiction. Grand-moman doesn't know a simile from an oxymoron, but she loves a meaty story, and she spends her days devouring one novel after the other. She reads indiscriminantly - great works and trash, masters and hacks. Before he even knows the alphabet, little Michel is trudging down the street transporting the books that Grand-moman has finished to her neighbor, Madame Allard, and bringing back fresh supplies. Curiously, Grand-moman and Madame Allard never meet each other; they are bound only by their common passion for a good read.

Touching, perceptive, and often hilarious, Un Ange cornu re-creates the author's early years up until the publication of his first fiction collection. Each chapter is dedicated to a book that influenced his life, from his first storybook to the sophisticated readings of his young adulthood. L'Auberge de l'Ange-Guardien [The Inn of the Guardian Angel], his first real book with more text than pictures, frustrates him to tears because it includes large segments of dialogue in play form. Furthermore, it was written by a certain Countess of Segur, and "Countess" sounds more to him like a dog's name than a person's. His mother's efforts to explain rank and nobility are truly sidesplitting, not only because of Tremblay's effervescent dialogue, but also because of his ability to capture, through the jumbled definitions of this unsophisticated housewife, the absurdity of the notion of social caste.

Un Ange cornu is not narrated from the perspective of the child Michel, but from that of the mature author who looks back and analyzes how his early readings formed his consciousness. Much of the poignancy derives from the innocence with which he approached certain texts and his gradual awakening to their underlying meanings. For example, Tintin au Congo [Tintin in the Congo], one volume in a popular French picture-book adventure series, is a frankly racist depiction of Europeans in Africa. As a...