Papa Boss, Quince Jam

Two great novels in one volume. No novelist captured the history and imagination of Quebec like Jacques Ferron. A practicing doctor among the Montreal south-shore poor, the hero of Vallieres’ White Niggers of America, his political separatism was never shrill, but tempered by a sardonic comic view. Papa Boss is his vision of the annunciation of the new Messiah, son of Papa Boss, Lord of the Firmament of high finance and technology. Quince Jam (and two other texts — Appendix to Quince Jam and Credit Due) deal with the problem of autonomy for Quebec and the autonomy of the individual — the author’s sense of his own identity in his uncertain country. These are works of a prose artist unlike any on this continent.