Francouer Novels [Paperback]

David Plante (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 547 pages
• Publisher: Plume (September 21, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0525480676
• ISBN-13: 978-0525480679
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,609,396 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

David Plante is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Francoeur trilogy--The Family, The Woods, and The Country--as well as a work of nonfiction, Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three. His work has appeared in many periodicals, The New Yorker and The Paris Review among them, and has been nominated for a National Book Award. He teaches writing at Columbia University and lives in New York and London.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FRANCOEUR NOVELS EVOKE FRENCH CANADIAN ENCLAVES, January 17, 2005

By 

Charleen Touchette "Author of IT STOPS WITH ME" (Santa Fe, New Mexico) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Francouer Novels (Paperback)

What a delight for a Canuck girl far from home to come across David Plante's FRANCOEUR NOVELS: The Family, the Woods, the Country. I read them as soon as they came out in the early eighties, and then looked for Plante's books everywhere. David's French Canadian enclave in Providence had much in common with the Woonsocket and Pawtucket of my youth. He nails the intensity of the French Catholic Church. Plantes' family, like most French Canadians, had an Indian ancestor. Naturally I was drawn and intriqued that he was also part Blackfeet. What was the Blackfeet, French Canadian, Rhode Island connection? The Northern Plains of Montana and Alberta Canada are worlds and thousands of miles away from the urban milltowns of New England. Yet when I traveled there the women looked like my grandmother Mimi and the men like her brother mon oncle Leo. They knew about the Lamberts and welcomed me into their homes and tipis. Mothers and grandmothers sent us home with gifts of pemmican and sweetgrass and pictures to show my grandmother and matantes of me and my toddler standing in front of the tipi they taught me to raise. Years later I met Tchin, a stately Blackfeet/Narragansett silverworker who said that many Blackfeet, who were legendary travelers like the French Canadians, had gone East in the eighteen thirties during a famine and many marriages had resulted. And then there were the Voyageurs who traveled West from the time they arrived in Canada in the 1500s returning with Indian brides, so that nearly every family had Indian ancestry shown in the chisled faces they bent over factory looms and in the straight black hair they kept braided and wrapped in kerchiefs to keep it from getting caught in the textile machines. Plante's lyrical and haunting FRANCOEUR NOVELS will feel queasily familar to those millions raised with "foi, langue, et famille" in French Canadian mill towns in New England, and reveal a little known culture to everyone else. I can't wait to read Plante's new AMERICAN GHOSTS.