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Cover of the book Life in the Court of Matane
Cover: Baraka Books

Memoir

Life in the Court of Matane

A novel by Eric Dupont with a Foreword by Heather O'Neil

Eric Dupont

Publisher
Baraka Books
Published
June 2021
Pages
280
Price
$19.95
ISBN
9781771862264
Language
English

The team behind the book

Translation
Peter McCambridge
Foreword
Heather O'Neill

Nadia Comaneci’s gold-medal performance at the Olympic Games in Montreal is the starting point for a whole new generation. Eric Dupont watches the performance on TV, mesmerized. The son of a police officer (Henry VIII) and a professional cook—as he likes to remind us—he grows up in the depths of the Quebec countryside with a new address for almost every birthday and little but memories of his mother to hang onto. His parents have divorced, and the novel’s narrator relates his childhood, comparing it to a family gymnastics performance worthy of Nadia herself.

Life in the court of Matane is unforgiving, and we explore different facets of it (dreams of sovereignty, schoolyard bullying, imagined missions to Russia, poems by Baudelaire), each based around an encounter with a different animal, until the narrator befriends a great horned owl, summons up the courage to let go of the upper bar forever, and makes his glorious escape.

Description from the publisher Baraka Books, seen in October 2026 · Source ↗

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