My Sister's Blue Eyes [Paperback]

All of us take stories as signposts for life. A fairytale dispenses some warning about sex with vagabonds. A blockbuster film inspires generational angst over climate change. It is commonplace to note this bleeding of the real world into glossier constructions. Still, in My Sister’s Blue Eyes, the new novel by Jacques Poulin (translated with characteristic brilliance by Sheila Fischman), what we get isn’t a bleeding but a hemorrhage.
Jimmy, our young narrator, stumbles into a bookshop on page one. He’s an aimless sort of man who wanders the streets of Montreal and pines for his absentee sister, Mistassini-yes, the one blessed with startling blue eyes. We begin to suspect that Jimmy confuses fact and fiction almost immediately; he’s drawn into the store when he spots a blue-covered book that calls to him. It’s no coincidence the colour is blue. How many bruised souls have found substitutes in literature when lived experience disappoints them?
On entering the cozy bookshop, Jimmy thinks he can hear the murmur of all the authors on the shelves. (Poulin’s books are often freckled with small moments of mad charm and My Sister’s Blue Eyes is no exception.)
The bookshop itself is a veritable hall of mirrors. The crotchety old fellow who runs it, one Jack Waterman, is a (regionally) famous translator for the Canadian Dictionary of Biography (more life bleeding into words). He runs what we might call a Dodo Bookshop-that is, one of those dusty, beloved, idiosyncratic stores that are soon to be extinct. In the centre of the main room we find a real, wood-burning hearth:

“The idea of putting in a stove was one that old Jack had taken from A Moveable Feast. He had been charmed by the passage in which Hemingway recounted his first visit to the bookstore Shakespeare and Company: when he pushed open the door, the writer, who was in his twenties at the time, had been greeted by warmth that came from the books piled up to the ceiling, from the stove that purred in the centre of the room, and from the kindness of the owner, Sylvia Beach, who had given him credit even though she didn’t know him.”

Poulin is giving his readers a hint here (a heavy-handed one, I think). The pages of his slim novel (it’s more like a meaty short story, really) teem with reminders that one tale will always fold into others.
Jack’s bookshop, where much of the ‘action’ takes place, is a permissive and porous venue. Youths are welcome to shoplift (Jack places books he thinks they should read near the entrance). And Jack is even afflicted with a kind of divine madness: he has Alzheimer’s disease, which forces him to patch up a deteriorating ‘real world’ with lines from his own writing and old songs.
The book does rhapsodize about literature-a self-congratulatory thread that will please bibliophiles but might tire the more casual reader. And Poulin has laced the story with echoes of his own literary triumph, Volkswagen Blues: both novels feature a homeless cat (who serves as a kind of feminine daemon); both include a precious and mysterious woman (who disappears and reappears like a phantom); there’s even a predilection for the odd word “zouave” in both books. Poulin’s spare, pleasantly mannered style is the perfect vehicle for metafictional tricks. Eventually, though, even a clever, meditative book like this has to have a little drama.
Jack hires Jimmy. He even gives the drifter a place to sleep in the bookstore’s back room. Then, Jimmy’s sister arrives, toting bohemian gifts and those come-hither eyes. And it doesn’t take long before Jimmy does go thither.
The brother and sister share a deep and frankly incestuous bond:

“I was happy to have my little sister back, to hold her in my arms, to feel the curves of her body merge with mine and to whisper in her ear, knowing that she couldn’t hear them, words that I could not say aloud.”

Suddenly, we’ve moved well beyond the safety of reading a book curled up by the fire. Flesh and blood dilemmas rear up and we begin to see what Jimmy has been avoiding with his nose buried deep in Hemingway.
Next comes a European jaunt. Old Jack encourages Jimmy to seek out the crumbling haunts of Parisian writers, but the youth spends a great deal more time hanging out in a Volkswagen minibus (shades of Volkswagen Blues again) chatting up transvestite prostitutes.
One lady of the night shares a bottle of Muscat with Jimmy and hashes out the world’s problems; she’s a kind of philosophy conduit for Poulin: one of her clients, she says, told her that society is advancing toward peace and justice, “with the majestic but inexorable slowness of a glacier.”
Newsflash: the glaciers are melting. Things could be progressing toward peace and justice if the world was structured like a story. But Jimmy’s life-and his taboo desire-doesn’t have some Apollonian story arc. The world (and affection, especially) is messy business.
So Poulin has given us in My Sister’s Blue Eyes a story to undo stories. The quietly tortured hero is caught, literally, in the narratives of others. And his own secret desires are banished to the realm of the unspoken.
By the time Jimmy gets home, Jack’s Alzheimer’s has taken over, and the mentor is lost to a world of poorly sustained imaginings. Mistassini, the object of desire, begins to retreat once more, and the bookshop (with its masses of sculpted novels) seems to mock anyone who yearns for the comfort of a storied life. Jimmy knows he can never act on his desires-so words replace them. A pale concession.
It’s a dark and depressing ending, if you ask me. And, given the multitude of inter- and meta-textual references, one can only wonder what Poulin is telling us about his own writing life. Does the author feel he has lost some vital part of himself by living too much in books? Or does he merely mean to toy with our assumptions about fiction and biography?
Jimmy is ultimately comforted by the notion that “I would always be able to put the things that made me sad into a story and attribute them to a character.” But aren’t these the sentiments of an addict? Jimmy, like so many who trade real life for the insular world of the mind, has given up on facing his own demons and wants only to hide them away for as long as possible under the protective hood of text.
Michael Harris (Books in Canada)

All the touchstones of a Poulin novel are here; the ever present VW bus, cats, loving sisters, books and reading, the question of ending one's life when necessary, the gracefulness and humour of living.The Sun Times (Owen Sound)