Because there isn’t just one way to accept the present, as the saying goes, and leave what’s passed in the past, here, brought together in these pages, are five literary or musical works that explore how—little by little or all at once—it’s possible to confront, overcome, or embrace what too often prevents us from moving forward.

EMOTIONS

La symphonie des éclairs, by Zaho de Sagazan (Virgin, 2023)

Celebrated at Victoires de la musique, where she won four of the most prestigious awards, including those for album of the year, female breakthrough artist, and original song (the enchanting title track), Zaho de Sagazan is, at 24 years old, in full command of her strengths from her first album. With her confident phrasing, mature voice, shroud of mystery, and taste for proud and complex pop, she deploys the full emotional palette that we need to master in order to flourish on a daily basis by assuming it with all our flesh. There’s love, of course, in its excitement (“Les garçons, Mon inconnu”), blindness (“Les dormantes”), grip (“Langage”), doubts (“Dis-moi que tu m’aimes”), or disappointments (“Je rêve, Suffisamment”). Sagazan also struggles with fear (“Ne te regarde pas”) or gloomy weather (“Tristesse”), asserting that “Les émotions sont des couleurs / [Elle est] le peintre qui les renverse” (“Emotions are colours / [She is] the painter who turns them upside down”). Until crossing the clouds “comme le fait la lumière” (“as the light does”), like a human storm releasing La symphonie des éclairs (the symphony of lightning bolts).

NOSTALGIA

Le tour du bloc. L’album du spectacle, by Michel Rivard and the Flybin Big Band (Spectra Musique, 2023)

After surveying his star chart in the musical theatre show L’origine de mes espèces, former truck driver Michel Rivard allows himself to revisit 50 years of songs while questioning what it costs us to orbit the Sun. No fewer than 11 musicians and backing vocalists accompany him on stage, the famous Flybin Big Band, and his repertoire gains a breadth and magnificence that is most contagious. From “tour du bloc” (“touring the block”) of his youth to those moments where the adult “fait tourner des ballons (sur son nez)” (“spins balloons [on his nose]”), passing through the tricks that life plays on us directly, he encourages us to reconcile ourselves with our past without succumbing to nostalgia, that “maîtresse inassouvie aux yeux trop bleus” (“unfulfilled mistress with eyes too blue”). Between the borrowings from Beau Dommage and the gems of his solo career, the songs resurface in disorder, like so many radiant memories “Tombé(s) du ciel” (“fallen from the sky”) through “Un trou dans les nuages” (“a hole in the clouds”). An album recorded in front of an audience that reshapes a “Maudit Bonheur” (“cursed happiness”) which should spill over onto everyone.

dEBTS

Le compte est bon, by Louis-Daniel Godin (La Peuplade, 2023)

What if adoption were the ultimate debt? A child now fully grown asks himself this obsessive question while dwelling on his core memories, encapsulating them in numerical values, from zero to twenty thousand, without forgetting infinity. Adopted when he was five days old, Louis-Daniel runs with all his soul after his credit note, deciphering each transaction into hard cash or symbolic currencies. With Le compte est bon, a wink at the French game Des chiffres et des lettres, first-time novelist Louis-Daniel Godin, keen on psychoanalysis, polishes a hypnotic writing style, magnetized by the call of the right word, which unfolds and folds back up, races forward and steps back, affirms and doubts in the same breath, empties the piggy bank without breaking it in order to better replenish it; “mais il faut avancer, il faut avancer quand même, sinon, sinon, sinon” (“but you have to move forward, have to move forward anyway, otherwise, otherwise, otherwise”). A little gem with a charming, controlled style, where figures take shape and give thanks to what will never be calculated.

WOUNDS

Nommer le vivant, by Mélilot de Repentigny (Leméac, 2024)

“De la vitalité à la dormance” (“From vitality to dormancy”) and vice versa and through all the natural states between these two poles, Myrique observes their environment according to the upheavals of their mental health. Because “il n’y a pas de meilleur remède à la grisaille que celui d’apprendre à nommer le vivant” (“there’s no better remedy for gloom than learning to name the living”), they rely on the perspective of Brother Marie-Victorin and his Laurentian Flora to identify and tame the species around them during their psychiatric stays, from Montreal to Rimouski. Having studied forestry techniques then developed a passion for picking all kinds of things, especially mushrooms, Myrique—the alter ego of Mélilot de Repentigny—paints nuanced and multidimensional portraits of the medical and nursing staff, but above all of their fellow hospitalized patients, on a territory where disorders and deficiencies, sap and sweat, insomnia and buried dreams abound. A first book that breathes deeply and forcefully reminds us that health is a matter of both movement and rootedness.

GOODBYES

Partir de loin, by Caroline Dawson and Maurèen Poignonec (La Bagnole, 2024)

Caroline is getting ready to board a plane with her children and takes the opportunity to tell them about her first flight, when she was only seven years old and had to leave behind not only almost all her toys, but above all, the country where she was born. A few months before her departure, the late Caroline Dawson published this beautiful children’s book in collaboration with illustrator Maurèen Poignonec, whose pencil strokes perfectly convey the liveliness specific to childhood. The author delicately addresses certain issues already raised in her famous story Là où je me terre, adapting them for young children and making no reference to Chile or to Spanish in order to broaden the readership’s horizons. Immigration and its multiple challenges, learning a language, preserving and discovering traditions—simply put, a new life takes shape, from school benches to the sugar shack, and another journey begins.