The Weight of Snow

Description

A badly injured man. A nationwide power failure. A village buried in snow. A desperate struggle for survival. These are the ingredients of The Weight of Snow, Christian Guay-Poliquin's riveting new novel. After surviving a major accident, the book's protagonist is entrusted to Matthias, a taciturn old man who agrees to heal his wounds in exchange for supplies and a chance of escape. The two men become prisoners of the elements and of their own rough confrontation as the centimetres of snow accumulate relentlessly. Surrounded by a nature both hostile and sublime, their relationship oscillates between commiseration, mistrust, and mutual aid. Will they manage to hold out against external threats and intimate pitfalls?

Christian Guay-Poliquin was born in Saint-Armand in 1982. He is now developing a thesis project on the hunting narrative and also works in renovation. The pencil on his ear serves to mark his measures as much as it does to record his ideas. Le fil des kilometers (La Peuplade, 2013) is his first novel, translated as Running on Fumes (Talonbooks, 2016). His second novel is Le poids de la neige (La Peuplae, 2016), Born and raised in Montreal, Jacob Homel has translated or collaborated in the translation of a number of works, including Nelly Arcan's Hysteric and Breakneck, The Battle of London and The Last Genet. In 2012, he won the J.I. Segal Translation Prize for his translation of A Pinch of Time. He currently lives in Montreal.

"It's not easy to make such a simple story both profound and compulsively readable, but Guay-Poliquin pulls it off in this literary page-turner." -Montreal Review of Books "There are four hundred times more descriptions of snow than you'd find in the average novel, yet that is precisely the right amount." -New York Magazine "There are four hundred times more descriptions of snow than you'd find in the average novel, yet that is precisely the right amount." -New York Magazine ~||~ "It's not easy to make such a simple story both profound and compulsively readable, but Guay-Poliquin pulls it off in this literary page-turner." -Montreal Review of Books ~||~ "Guay-Poliquin has somehow managed to turn descriptions of a long black highway through the prairies and a snow-filled landscape seen through a cabin window into an engrossing world where nothing monumental needs to happen in order to keep his readers - at least this one - hooked." -Patty Osborne, Geist magazine ~||~ "A claustrophobically tense novel of deceptive simplicity, its stark plot and captivating language cuts into readers like an icy wind." -Speculative Fiction in Translation ~||~ "With no word wasted, brisk chapters that are often less than two pages keep the reader clipping along. The harsh winter is an interesting environment to explore in a post-apocalyptic world, rather than the tired and overused wind-swept desert." -Keith Cadieux, Winnipeg Free Press "His prose has the boiled-wool sensibility of far northern climes: a refreshing dearth of adjectives, characters who inquire after each other with variations on "What's with you?" and an almost-hallucinogenic attentiveness to the textural nuances of snow." -Chelsea Edgar, Seven Days