The Road Past Altamont

by Roy, Gabrielle

• ISBN13: 9780771094248
• ISBN10: 0771094248
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-01-05
• Publisher: New Canadian Library

Summary

InThe Road Past Altamont, Roy daringly returns to the same characters and the nearly identical timespan ofStreet of Riches, but by looking at her subjects with an entirely fresh vision, she creates a wholly new and deeply personal story of young Christine's decision to become a writer. This haunting and poignant tale weaves a delicate but substantial network of impressions, emotions, and human relationships. From the Paperback edition.

Author Biography

GABRIELLE ROY -- author of The Tin Flute, Where Nests the Water Hen, The Road Past Altamont, The Cashier, Children of My Heart, and many other books — was a three-time winner of the Governor General's Award; she also won the Prix Femina, the Prix David, the Prix Duvernay, the Molson Award, and the Canada Council Medal for outstanding cultural achievement.

Excerpts

One
 
I was six years old when my mother sent me to spend part of the summer with my grandmother in her village in Manitoba.
 
I balked slightly at going. My old grandmother frightened me a little. She was known to be so devoted to order, cleanliness, and discipline that you couldn’t leave the tiniest thing lying about at her house. With her, it seemed, it was always, “Pick up after yourself, put away your things, as the twig is bent . . .” and other admonitions of the sort. As well, nothing exasperated her so much as the tears of children, which she called “mewling” or “caterwauling.” That was another thing: her rather curious way of speaking, partly invented by herself and often far from easy to figure out. Later, however, I found several of my grandmother’s expressions in my oldLittréand realized they must date back to the time when the first settlers came to Canada from France.
 
Yet she must have found time heavy on her hands, for it was her own idea that I should spend part of the summer in her company. “Send the little sickly one to me,” she wrote in a letter my mother showed me as proof that I would be welcome at Grandmother’s.
 
Those words “little sickly one” had already made me feel none too well-disposed toward my grandmother; so it was in a more or less hostile frame of mind that I set out for her house one day in July. I told her so, moreover, the moment I set foot in her house.
 
“I’m going to be bored here,” I said. “I’m sure of it. It’s written in the sky.”
 
I didn’t know that this was precisely the sort of language to amuse and beguile her. Nothing irritated her as much as the hypocrisy that is natural to so many children—”wheedling and coaxing,” she called it.
 
So at my dark prediction I saw something that in itself was unusual enough. She was smiling faintly.
 
“You’ll see. You may not be as bored as all that,” she said. “When I want to, when I really set my mind to it, I know a hundred ways to keep a child amused.”
 
But, for all her proud words, it was she herself who was often bored. Almost no one came to see her any more. She had swarms of grandchildren, but she seldom saw them, and her memory was failing, so it was difficult for her to tell one of them from another.
 
From time to time a car full of young people would slow down at the door, perhaps stop for an instant; a bevy of young girls would wave their hands, calling, “Hello, Mémère. How are you?”
 
Grandmother would just have time to run to the doorstep before the girls disappeared in a whirlwind of fine dust.
 
“Who were they?” she would ask. “Cléophas’s daughters? Or Nicolas’s? If only I’d had my spectacles I would have recognized them.”
 
“That,” I would inform her, “was Berthe, Alice, Graziella and Anne-Marie.”
 
“Ah!” she would say, struggling to remember whether these particular girls were the daughters of Nicolas, of Cléophas, or of Alberic.
 
The next moment she would begin to argue with herself. “But no. What am I thinking? Most of Nicolas’s children are boys.”
 
She would go to sit for a moment in her rocking chair beside the window to try to settle the matter once for all and make a complete inventory of her descendants. I loved seeing her like this, looking for all the world as if she were unraveling some skeins of tangled wool.
 
“In Cléophas’s family,” she would begin, “there’s Gertrude first, then the oldest son—now what is that big dark boy’s name? Is it Rémi?&rdquo

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Excerpted from The Road Past Altamont by Gabrielle Roy
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