By Maxime Raymond Bock In Books, Featured Books, and QC Fiction Tagged In fiction, Historical Fiction, literary fiction, Maxime Raymond Bock, Mélissa Bull, Montreal, Morel, Novel, and working class literature.

Morel

Published Date: June 1, 2024

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JUNE 2024

Born during the Great Depression, Jean-Claude Morel is an Everyman, a Montreal construction worker who has built the city with his own hands, digging its metro, creating islands, and weaving expressways through the downtown core. But the progress has come at a cost: neighbourhoods have been razed, streets wiped off the map, and the Morel family expropriated.

Teeming with life, Morel uncovers a story of Montreal that has been buried under years of glitzy urban renewal and modernization. This intricately constructed literary novel is a profoundly human portrait of one man and his time, a monument to a city, and a toast to days gone by.

Maxime Raymond Bock was born in Montreal, where he lives today. His first book, a collection of short stories, won the Prix Adrienne-Choquette and was published by Dalkey Archive Press as Atavisms in 2015. Baloney, a novella, was published by Coach House Books in 2016. Morel, his début novel, has been a finalist for the Prix des libraires, Prix littéraire des collégien∙ne∙s, Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, Prix Senghor, and the Rendez-vous du premier roman.
Melissa Bull is a half-franco, half-anglo writer, editor, and translator. She is the author of a collection of poetry, Rue, and a collection of fiction, The Knockoff Eclipse. Melissa is the translator of Pascale Rafie’s play, The Baklawa Recipe, Nelly Arcan’s collection Burqa of Skin, and Marie-Sissi Labrèche’s novel, Borderline. Melissa has a BA in Creative Writing from Concordia University and an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. She lives in Montreal.
Reviews and Praise
“Rich in love, memory, loss, regret and the kind of hard-won hope that comes from just keeping going and keeping close despite everything, Bock’s Morel is a forgiving/unforgiving portrait of a working-class man and the generations of family which surround him, told in the tough yet beautiful language of real life. Written in masterful prose, deftly and vividly translated into English by Mélissa Bull, it rings with deep understanding and compassion. Life maybe be hard but it’s also difficult. Life is sweet but it’s also tender.”– Gary Barwin, author, Yiddish for Pirates
“Morel is a love letter to the Montreal of the past, present, and future — to the Montreal that might have been, the Montreal forgotten. It’s a cliché to say that a city is a character in a novel, but to Bock, a city is like a life, with painful and joyful memories accumulating and disappearing like archaeological material.”– Sam White, The Literary Review of Canada
“Bock’s hero—his unusual name nested in the name of his city—becomes a metonym for a generation of Montreal’s working class. Haunted in old age by aches and pains, Morel is a ‘grey, perpetually broken and patched body, left piece by piece to the city.’ Some workers give their lives, falling down ventilation shafts or stairwells; others drown in hot asphalt or are killed by falling debris. Though their bodies form part of the new Montreal, they are only pawns, forced to ‘compete with each other when they’re equally together in this mess, ruin their bodies and souls for fistfuls of change when they made towers surge from the ground for multimillionaires.'”– Eamon McGrath, Full Stop

“[An] astounding book (. . . ) a mini-epic of an ordinary man, and a time capsule of post-war Montreal with all its problems, economic, political and environmental. I highly recommend it.” James Fisher, The Miramichi Reader

“It’s a gritty story of a working-class Montreal family – the Morels of the title. (. . .) a novel that reminds me of some of Zola’s representations of working people in similar circumstances” Simon Lavery, Tredynas Days

“The author’s language is as precise as the actions he describes, as rich as the demons that trouble Morel, as bustling as the neighborhood that is swallowed up. And it turns out to be unexpectedly beautiful: a deeply buried gold nugget, freshly dug out, covered in earth, that suddenly starts to gleam.”– Josée Boileau, Le Journal de Montréal
“A novel both monumental and ethereal.”– Philippe Manevy, Lettres québécoises
“It makes brilliant use of language, rides roughshod over clichés about the Grande Noirceur, and delves deep into working-class alienation, with an incredible appetite for manual labour and all things homo faber. […] Morel is the most accomplished and liveliest working-class saga you’ll have the pleasure of reading this year.”– Olivier Boisvert, Librairie Gallimard

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