Not Everybody Lives the Same Way
A Novel
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
International bestseller Not Everybody Lives the Same Way is a powerfully original and unusual novel. Masterfully translated by David Homel and brilliantly animated by Jean-Paul Dubois’s keen feeling for humanity and intense revolt against all forms of injustice, it asks the question: What does it takes to live a dignified life?
Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Fiction
Paul Hansen is in prison. He’s been in this prison on the outskirts of Montreal for a couple of years now, sharing a cell with a murderous Hells Angel who often reminds Paul that he could kill him at any moment. What did Paul do to end up here? And why does he jeopardize his life and release by refusing to show remorse?
Before prison, there were his parents. There were his friends at the Excelsior, the luxury apartment complex where Paul worked as caretaker as well as restorer of souls and comforter of the afflicted. And there was his partner, Winona, an intrepid seaplane pilot, and their beloved dog, Nouk. Many of those closest to him are gone now, but Paul still talks to them; they appear in his dreams and as ghosts in his cell.
From France in the sixties to the asbestos mines of Québec, from the sand dunes of the peninsula where the Baltic connects to the North Sea to the wild lakes and mountains of Canada, Jean-Paul Dubois’s extraordinary novel Not Everybody Lives the Same Way, follows this man, Paul Hansen, as he reviews his life. A life of equilibrium, it has given Paul both tragedy and gifts––that is, until the moment when fate presents him with someone capable of breaking his balance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dubois's engaging but oddly inert Prix Goncourt winner sees a middle-aged man recall his life from prison. Paul Christian Frederic Hansen, a longtime apartment building superintendent, is serving two years for an undisclosed crime in Montreal. His cellmate is Patrick Horton, a member of the Hells Angels awaiting sentencing for murdering a fellow biker. In between chronicling Horton's struggles, which include a toothache, fear of rats, bowel movements, and anxiety over haircuts, Hansen examines his past. He grew up in Toulouse, France, where his Danish father, Johanes, was a Protestant pastor and his French mother, Anna, ran an independent cinema. His parents divorced after Anna screened Deep Throat in 1975, and Johanes moved to a small mining town in Quebec, where Hansen soon joined him. Dubois gets things off the ground with his portrayal of Johanes, whose loss of faith and a gambling problem cost the pastor his job; his subsequent death costs the novel its most intriguing character. Hansen moves to Montreal where he takes up the superintendent job and meets his wife, who flies a float plane. Bland interactions with building residents, plus wiki-deep digressions into miscellany like subprime mortgages, drag the plodding plot toward the inexorable reveal of Hansen's crime. In the end, this comes up short.
