Not Everybody Lives the Same Way: A Novel

by Jean-Paul Dubois

Other authorsDavid Homel (Translator)

Hardcover, 2022

Genres

Description

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER AND 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 and winner of the Prix Goncourt 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. 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?… (more)

Publication

Harry N. Abrams (2022), 240 pages

User reviews

LibraryThing member thorold

Paul Hansen, a former apartment-building supervisor, is sharing a cell in a Montreal prison with the notoriously scary Hell's Angels gang-leader Patrick Horton. We're not told the nature of Hansen's offence until the end of the book, but he's clearly quite a different type from his cellmate, and a

lot of the interest of the book is in watching the development of a friendship between the two men. Meanwhile, Hansen delves into his memory and looks back at those who mattered to him: his French mother, who ran an independent cinema in Toulouse; his Danish father, protestant pastor and descendant of a long line of Skagen fishermen; his wife Winona, an Irish-Algonquin bush pilot; his friend Kieran Read, an insurance adjuster whose job is to find out bad things about deceased people; and his dog Nouk. All of them existing at different angles to the universe.

There's a lot of information here. We learn a good deal about French cinema of the fifties and sixties, Harley-Davidsons and eccentric European cars, about flying the DHC-2 Beaver, the maintenance of lawns and swimming-pools, prison food, asbestos mining, Skagen sand-dunes, organ music, casinos and race-courses, and much else. And it's not always easy to see what it all adds up to, or how it maps onto the inner lives of the characters. In the end, I think it was a kind of French/Canadian take on Nevil Shute's Trustee from the toolroom, a novel about a man who seems to be fully wrapped up in the mechanical world, but who turns out to have a limit to the amount of senseless destruction of human happiness he can tolerate.

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