Winner of the 1979 Governor General's Award for fiction, Antonine
Maillet's virtuoso creation, The Tale of Don L'Orignal, is now back
in print. Maillet's tale begins one day, not so very long ago but
back in the youth of the world, when a hay-covered island
materialized off shore, an island populated by fleas who soon took
human form. The leader of this uncouth crew of have-nots, Don
l'Orignal, wore a moose-antler crown as his badge of office. At his
right hand were his brave lieutenants: his son, Noume, and his
general, Michel-Archange. The general's wife, the doughty
charwoman, spy, and rabble-rouser La Sagouine, had one finger in
every pie and one raised to her neighbour, La Sainte. The Flea
Islanders were constantly at odds with the almost as clever but far
more civilized upper crust of the mainland village: the mayoress,
the schoolteacher, the merchant, the banker. When they invaded and
tried to steal a keg of molasses, the outcome of the mock-heroic
battle was unclear, except that La Sainte's son, the hapless young
Citrouille, and Adeline, the merchant's lovely daughter, had fallen
in love. With the insider's accumulation of oral history, gossip,
and shrewd hindsight, Antonine Maillet has conjured up a fictional
Acadia that her ancestors would relish. Perhaps those who could
read it would have even understood it: she wrote Don l'Orignal in a
version of 16th-century domestic French that she adapted for modern
readers. In this far-fetched, but always entertaining fable,
Maillet holds up a mirror to Acadian history and to an all too
fallible human nature.
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