[In the following review, Socken remarks on the style and themes of the stories collected in Tales from the Uncertain Country.]

Jacques Ferron is one of Quebec's most highly acclaimed writers, and a translation of some of his short stories by Betty Bednarski makes his writing accessible to an English-speaking audience for the first time.

In Tales from the Uncertain Country, a collection of eighteen short stories, the reader can acquire a representative glimpse of Ferron's very unusual world. Ferron is concerned with people's origins, and their quest to determine who they are and where they belong. His is a study of people's roots, and the relationships people establish with those around them. Ferron's only enemy is complacency and unfounded pride, as we see them ridiculed in 'Tiresome Company', a story in which a young doctor's pride is quickly deflated in very picturesque terms.

Ferron's creative approach, the reader should be forewarned, is not commonplace. He is the only writer writing today, anywhere, who uses the fable, the legend, what the French call the 'conte', as his literary vehicle. He does not simply make allusions to Greek myth or tales like 'Little Red Riding Hood', he actually uses the framework of the legend itself, preserving certain elements of the story, discarding others. The language and style is a mixture of the ancient, the modern, and what Bednarski calls 'Ferronesque'. This unusual literary device places Ferron's works in an historical context of didactic or 'message-oriented' writing, and there are indeed many lessons to be learned from these little stories. What one gains is a new perspective, a new way of seeing our familiar world, but any reader tempted to look for simplistic solutions is mocked in tales like 'The Buddhist'. In that story, the smug, self-satisfied statement at the end serves to caution the reader against facile interpretations and sententious judgements. The 'conte' framework also gives Ferron a flexibility that he uses to great advantage. As narrator, he is able to distance himself from the scene he is presenting, sometimes for ironic effect ('Ulysses'), sometimes allowing him to comment on what has taken place ('The Archangel of the Suburb'). One is not accustomed to reading this kind of story, and in the end the reader finds himself very much involved, participating actively in the story and its meaning.

Ferron treats a wide range of subjects that include love, marriage and death, but his focus is always on people trying to make sense of their relationships with others and trying to reconcile themselves to the world they live in. In 'Cadieu', a boy who has succeeded in the world beyond his home tries to rediscover his home and his past and cannot as his family fails to recognize him on his return. In 'Black Cargo Ships of War', a woman waits for her son to return to her after he has gone to war, and they are united again only in death. In 'The Sirens', a modern-day Ulysses finds that the world of legend is incomprehensible to his neighbours and that he himself is cut off from his heroic past. People in Ferron's world are often isolated from the ones they love and from a sense of their own fulfilment.

Ferron views the stuff of human relationships very cynically. In 'Back to Val d'Or', a woman's unbounded love becomes an obstacle to her relations with the world, and in 'How the Old Man Died' and in 'The Child' the sterility of the husband-wife relationship is vividly portrayed. But for all his cynicism, Ferron's very real sympathy and concern come through most emphatically in such stories as 'The Bridge' and 'Les Méchins'.

Ferron's very deep concern that people be able to relate to one another is felt in these stories. He uses the fable, where distinctions between the animal world and the human world, between reality and fantasy are blurred, in order to build a new world and a new reality. In the original version of 'Little Red Riding Hood', the wolf succeeds in its plot to eat the little girl. In this new world, however, Little Red Riding Hood laughs with her grandmother as the wolf is outsmarted. The uncertain country Ferron writes about is the land of the imagination where the artist restructures reality and dispenses justice according to his own concepts.

There is no doubt that Ferron himself feels the isolation that we find in his characters and that is so characteristic of Quebec writers. As Ferron says in 'Back to Kentucky', 'Montreal is only a stop on the way from Belgium to Kentucky.' The feeling of being a minority, a colonized people, lends an interesting insight into Ferron's fascinating world. The political and social reality cannot be ignored. It adds a profound dimension to Ferron's work, and anyone interested in Quebec culture and society will read Ferron with interest. But there is so much more to Ferron's work that overemphasizing the political aspect of it would be an injustice to the work as a whole.

Betty Bednarski has given us both a good translation and a good selection of Ferron's short stories, one that will be welcomed by English-speaking Canadians.