Denis Thériault’s The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman
Ironically for someone who is studying English and French, I actually don’t get to read a lot.
However on my metro commute to work, I’ve gotten into the habit of reading a Kindle book on my phone. I’m so in love with Amazon’s Daily Deal that lets me pick up an eclectic collection of 99p eBooks to lose myself in and ignore any creepers in the carriage.
A recent favourite was Denis Thériault’s The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman. His protagonist Bilodo is a Montreal postman who lives a lonely, but highly routine life with one secret: he steals letters to steam them open and live vicariously through the private conversations that he’s privy to. It’s thanks to this that he comes across the beautiful haikus exchanged between the Guadeloupian beauty Ségolène and a master-poet of his neighbourhood, Gaston Grandpré. He is moved by Ségolène’s poems like no other letter and his heart is captured by their elegant simplicity.
However, his routine of following their exchanges with breathless excitement is halted by one fateful day.
Grandpré runs out into the street to deliver a letter, is hit by a car and promptly dies while muttering his final words of ‘Enso’. The letter is washed away and lost but this shocking turn of events also eventually leads to Bilodo impersonating Grandpré to continue the letters to Ségolène.
Yet, he slowly eschews his old apartment, job, life and identity to slowly immerse himself completely into the routine of Grandpré.
Questioning the notion of time, for instance with an almost Zen Buddhist inspired ending and exploring the idea of identity, even with the less obvious passion of Grandpré’s for Japanese culture, Thériault also creates an ode to the art of letter-writing and poetry.
Even those who are familiar with the Haiku and its more courtly form, the Tanka, will appreciate their beauty in this story. They cleverly further the plot but make the reader’s insight into the central love story more intimate than the more explicit descriptions of other novels.
The letter-writing allows new-comers to the form recognise their effectiveness as well as how unfortunate it is that letter-writing is dying out. From my recent visit from the Paris market, Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen and reading through its postcards, there is something so touching about having to carefully choose your words rather than firing off a text.
Simultaneously comic and tragic, the novella avoids any moral quibbles with the central love story due to the fable-like narrative as Thériault writing veers into magical realism as well as the sympathetic Bilodo’s attempts to progress with his poetic skills.
Thériault has ultimately written a small but extremely moving tale that brightened up my bleak metro journey.
