Ramasseur by Richard deMeulles
At point of death an unnamed man grasps and attempts to make sense of lightning-bright shards of memory—of a house with 5 foster children and a foster mother “as strong as a man,” each of them with a history that together form a series of tales shading off into myth in the shadow of Shabaqua mountain, where the witch created time...
A magically-realistic novel in the form of a story-sequence, Ramasseur is a series of exquisitely crafted, highly readable tales that conspires to draw readers into a larger puzzle that’s sure to keep them up late into the night. While these gripping little tales of beasts, prophets and saints are set in a remote mining town and span three generations, the book’s themes resonate with universal modern anxieties about memory, identity and the possibility of reconciliation. Having affinities with Lola Lemire Tostevin’s Frog Moon, Melissa Hardy’s The Uncharted Heart, and David Adams Richards’s Miramichi, deMeulles’ work also draws to mind the contemporary Irish writers Dermot Healy and Patrick McCabe, and even harks back in structure to Joyce’s Dubliners.
"Ramasseur is a brilliant novel ... I am going through it again. ... accomplished and really brilliant for a first novel."
—Veronica Ross, author of Hannah B. and the Carolyn Archer mysteries
"Ric deMeulles’ haunting first novel manages at once to be a tidy disquisition on the nature of time and story and the darkest of fairy tales—one that delineates for the reader the life cycle of a curse and of its slow unraveling. deMeulles is a writer to watch. Both his voice and his vision are unique; when applied to the northern Ontario community in which Ramasseur is set, they bring to light and to life a hornet’s nest of possibilities, all of which turn out to be not what you expected."
—Melissa Hardy, author of The Uncharted Heart
"Imagistic and wildly “geeways,” this is a furious telling of people surviving (or not) in tough country. No sepia-toned nostalgia here, the North Ontario sense of humour is rendered intact—black and bitter. deMeulles employs a rock ’em sock ’em style but evokes a very recognizable world: sex and betrayal, the family secrets no one will tell you until it’s far too late, the restless, hungry kids with fabulous nicknames, the town drunks and loose women, larger than death, stalking gravel streets or pacing on cold linoleum."
—Mansel Robinson, author of Rock ’N Rail: Ghost Trains & Spitting Slag
"Anyone who has lived in northern Ontario knows the extent to which its diverse cultural history is steeped in the oral tradition. Tall tales, folklore, fragments of stories grow with each telling as they are passed on from generation to generation.
The English definition of Ramasseur is “gatherer,” but Richard deMeulles’ first novel is not simply the gathering or the retelling of old tales. Many of the sentences throughout begin with an ellipsis giving the impression of a complementary extension of narratives that wind and rewind into new beginnings.
deMeulles’ writing is dynamic, innovative, self-reflexive and always accessible. Its strength resides in its relation to a vibrant cast of characters in settings where the spoken word still resides."
—Lola Lemire Tostevin, author of Frog Moon
Available Now!
Sample some chapters, here
Book Details
May, 2008
ISBN 1-896350-28-3, 978-1-896350-28-8
294pp. softcover
Price $22.00
About the Author
Richard deMeulles, of Sudbury, was raised in a large, Franco-Celtic household in the hardrock mining town of Timmins, and has spent most of his working life in and around mining and forestry. For over twenty-five years he has been publishing stories in Canadian literary magazines such as Descant, On Spec, Cross Canada Writers’ Magazine. His work has been anthologized in On Spec: The First Five Years (Tesseract Books, 1995, ISBN 1-895836-12-3) and in Bluffs: Northeastern Ontario Stories from the Edge (Your Scrivener Press, 2006, ISBN 1-896350-18-6); in 1988 he was awarded second place in the Cross Canada Writers’ Magazine’s writing contest. Ramasseur is his remarkable novelistic debut. For more information, check out Ric's website here.