The Gazette (Montreal)
April 30, 2005 Saturday
Final Edition
Quebec history woven into family saga: Orphanage at core of story is
run by Christian Brothers
by CLAIRE HOLDEN ROTHMAN, Freelance
Le Silence de Mozart
By Vania Jimenez
Quebec Amerique, 379 pages, $24.95
You’d think that a woman with seven children and a job running
medical services at one of Montreal’s busiest downtown clinics
wouldn’t have time to read novels, let alone write them. You’d be
wrong.
Named Quebec Family Doctor of the Year in 1999, Vania Jimenez has
just published Le Silence de Mozart, a historical novel about the
Notre Dame de la Misericorde religious order and the orphanage it
operated from 1924 until 1976, when the Quebec government shut it
down.
Although Jimenez displays considerable knowledge about Quebec culture
and history, she is no Quebecoise de souche. Born in Egypt to parents
of Armenian descent, she came to Montreal at 18 to study medicine at
McGill University. She speaks five languages and works in one of
Montreal’s most culturally diverse neighbourhoods.
Le Silence de Mozart is her second novel. The first, Le Seigneur de
l’oreille (2003), featured a female doctor working in contemporary
Montreal. This second one moves deliberately away from autobiography.
The theme is fathers and sons and all but one of the multiple
first-person narrators are men.
The plot has nothing to do with the Austrian composer. Set in Quebec
in the 1930s and ’40s, it traces the life of a working-class man
named Mozart Menard, whose wife dies, leaving him with two young
sons. Emotionally and financially depleted, he gives the boys up to
the Church and eventually they end up at the Huberdeau orphanage, run
by the Notre Dame de la Misericorde Christian brotherhood. The older
boy, Guy, takes his vows and changes his name to Frere Laurier. His
younger brother, Louis, is adopted; contact between the boys is
broken.
The novel follows Mozart Menard, his sons and eventually his adult
grandson, Michel. In a stroke of Dickensian coincidence, Michel,
whose father Louis never mentioned his childhood prior to adoption,
ends up spending a night at Huberdeau. There, he meets Frere Laurier
and forges links with a family he was unaware he had.
Jimenez’s book is a fascinating portrait of Quebec from the 1930s
onward, focusing on institutions that have recently been the object
of controversy and scrutiny. Christian brotherhoods once provided
almost all of the education in this province for boys and young men.
They also provided care for destitute, orphaned, mentally ill or
delinquent children. In the 1940s, the period during which much of
the novel is set, there were more than 13,000 men in such groups.
Today, according to Jimenez, there are barely 1,200 in Quebec and, at
an average age of 70, they won’t last much longer.
Two of Jimenez’s main characters are likable, aging religious
brothers who argue that their order played a valuable role in Quebec
society. One of them offers an account of the Huberdeau Orphanage
from its founding in 1887 to its closing by the Parti Quebecois 90
years later. He chronicles the fire that destroyed the place in 1946,
leaving 400 boys homeless, and reminds readers that Notre Dame de la
Misericorde, which barely had funds to support its members, housed,
fed, clothed and schooled destitute children on its own, with almost
no government help.
While this history is fascinating, Jimenez fails in the writerly task
of delivering it in dramatic form. Because most of the book is in
monologue, she slips frequently into summary, forgetting that scene
is the lifeblood of fiction. The year 1945, she writes in a
characteristic passage, “marquera la fin de la guerre. Les hommes
sont-ils revenus au pays? Les femmes se sont-elles remariees?
Soudain, il semblera y avoir moins d’enfants malpris au Quebec.”
Characters with little at stake in the Menard family drama narrate
big chunks of the plot, while potentially dramatic incidents, like
one involving sexual abuse at Huberdeau, appear only peripherally,
with characters so minor that the reader has trouble caring much. Le
Silence de Mozart deals with an intriguing, controversial part of
Quebec’s past. Jimenez hasn’t quite managed to bring it to life.
Claire Holden Rothman is a Montreal writer and translator.