I loved this book! Paul's story was really interesting and kept you on your toes throughout the whole book. It is a truly heartbreaking story though. It is very well written and I highly recommend it.

"Even if faith has long since deserted me. Even if praying has become impossible. Soon you will have the time and leisure to judge and condemn me. I ask you to keep in mind these few words I learned from my father, and that he would use to minimise a person’s sins: ‘Not everyone lives in the world the same way.’ If he sees you, may God bless you.”

Not Everybody Lives the Same Way is the 2022 translation by David Homel of Tous les hommes n’habitent pas le monde de la même façon (2019) by Jean-Paul Dubois.

The French original won the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 2019. The comment from the chair of the judges, Bernard Pivot, essentially said that if this novel had been translated from English into French it would have been hailed as a masterpiece:

He said that the author «est quelqu'un de très moderne dans sa vision du monde et son écritur ... Si les romans de Jean-Paul Dubois étaient traduits de l’anglais, il aurait en France un statut comparable à ceux de John Irving ou de William Boyd»

And in the NY Times, interviewed by Annalisa Quinn, another juror Philippe Claudel commented on the appeal of the North American (specifically Canadian) setting of the novel: “We are fascinated by you, and at the same time we are very critical.”

There is a lot packed in to the c250 pages of the novel (and I commend the author for not making it 500 pages, which he easily could) and it has an unusual and distinctive tone, veering from melancholic to ironic, humane to scatalogical, sentimental to mechanical.

The novel opens in January 2010. Our narrator Paul Christian Frederic Hansen, aged 55, is in Bordeaux Prison in Montreal, just over halfway through a two-year sentence for a crime whose exact details are only revealed at the novel's end but which early on we can infer was a violent act of revenge or retaliation: When I first laid eyes on you, I wouldn’t have thought you had it in you. You did the right thing. No two ways about it. I would have killed him dead, comments his cell-mate, a Hell's Angel with a phobia about having his hair cut and no sense of shame about his bodily function, and who provides the comic relief in the novel.

His companions are the spirits of the three people most dear to him: Winona, his wife, Nouk, their dog and Johanes, his father:

"They would enter, and I could see them as clearly as all the squalor this cell contained. They would speak, they were here, close by. Ever since I lost them, years ago, they have come and gone in my thoughts, at home there. They say what is on their minds, go about their business, try and repair the disorder of my life and sometimes find the words that can ease me into sleep and the peace of the evening. Each in their own way, with their particular roles and attributes, they support me and never judge. Especially when I ended up in prison. They did not know any more than I did how it happened, nor why everything turned upside down so fast, in a matter of days. They were not there to unearth the origin of my misfortune. They were simply striving to recreate our family."

Hansen's narration has sudden shifts between the present and his thoughts on the past, demarcated only by paragraph breaks, which effectively capture the long hours spent thinking in his cell on those he has lost and how he ended up here, interrupted by his cell mate’s own random musings on Harley Davidson bikes or his unconcealed bodily functions.

But we soon piece together his story. He was born in Toulouse, in the Clinique des Teinturiers, on February 20, 1955, at ten in the evening, his mother Anna Madeleine Margerit a native of the French city, and his father Johanes Hansen a Protestant pastor originally from a long line of fishermen in Skagen in Jutland, Denmark and something of a fish-out-of-water in the French Catholic town. is mother and father divorce, in part as his mother's business running a cinema that, post Deep Throat, specialises in artistic porn, is rather in conflict with his father's profession.

Johanes moves to Canada, to the strip-mining town of Thetford Mines (named after the Norfolk town close to my birthplace), founded after the discovery of asbestos deposits and Paul follows him there.

He ends up in a role that he holds for 26 years up to his imprisonment, superintendent of an apartment complex largely inhabited by elderly residents.

"For twenty-six years, in the Ahuntsic district, less than a kilometre from the prison – at the beginning it was terribly troubling to be locked up so close to home – I practised the very demanding trade of superintendent, a combination of magician and jack-of-all-trades, a top-drawer factotum who could restore and repair a whole little world of specialised operations, a complex universe made of cables, tubes, pipes, junctions, derivations, columns, traps and dating devices, a playful little world always eager to go haywire, create problems and induce breakdowns that had to be solved immediately with a reservoir of memory, knowledge, technique, observation and sometimes plain dumb luck. In the apartment building called the Excelsior, I was a sort of deus ex machina."

There he becomes more that just a caretaker of the building but increasingly a key part of many of the residents' lives, such as one who is an insurance loss adjustor (but somewhat opposed to his own profession), and who uses that analogy (and the infamous Ford Pinto affair) to explain their mutual opposition to a new arrival, Sedgwick, who takes over the residents' association and instigates cost-cutting which threatens Paul's way of running the building:

“The Pinto affair is only the tip of the iceberg, the part of the world you can see where the worth of human beings is negotiated, above an infraworld where the lives of human beings, real as they once were, are calculated on the basis of ratios that are no more than the work of accountants. I remember a few years ago, a bill concerning these issues was introduced in the US Senate. Among other things, it stated that using dollars to determine the value of a life, when a decision had to be made, was profoundly offensive to the religions, ethnic beliefs, and shared morals of the people of the nation. The bill also mentioned that the use of racial criteria and factors that took into account income, state of health, age and disability should also be banned. After the insurance company lobby got its claws into it, the bill was rejected, then thrown into the shredder. Now, Paul, you might say there’s no comparison, and that I’m exaggerating, but a guy like Sedgwick, and I know of what I speak, could very well have written the Pinto Memo.”

Halfway through his tenure, in 2006, he meets and marries Winona, a sea-plane pilot from a mixed Irish-Algonquin backgroun, and the two eventually acquire a stray, who they name Nouk, as their dog:

"I recalled what Serge Bouchard, the anthropologist and specialist in Indigenous Canadian cultures, once said: “Man is a bear that turned out badly.”

My wife Winona was Algonquin, and I read a lot of Bouchard to learn about her culture. Back then I was a slowfooted Frenchman who knew almost nothing about the charms of the trembling tent, the mystical rules of the sweat lodge, the foundational legend of the raccoon, the pre-Darwinian reasoning according to which “man is descended from the bear”, and the story that tells why “the caribou has white spots only under his mouth”."

Paul's narration is at times highly sentimental but the engineer/builder/handyman in him retains a fascination with the mechanics of engines (the Wankel rotary engine a particular favourite of his father), church organs and the architecture of church buildings:

"A rounded vault, multiple caissons, a triple nave transept, solid wood and stone everywhere, pews as thick as tree trunks, all identical, the decoration baroque to the extreme. And artwork in every corner, in every form, paintings and embroidered fabric, altars with Swiss gold leaf, painted woodwork in a pale green shade, and the smell, that essence of well-maintained houses. Not to mention the eight decontamination stations, eight parlours of sin, eight intimidating confessionals whose dimensions and number suggested that Satan came to sup in the town every evening.

The cherry on the sundae, perched in the top balcony, its pipes looking down on the sea of faithful, was a Casavant organ, opus 150, built in 1902, with twenty-one ranks, twenty-seven stops, plus another set of ranks using the pedals, and more pipes than anyone could need."

Worthwhile if somewhat quirky and in a way it's odd to read a novel translated into English hailed as one as good as those translated from English into French.

You know those books which just warm your heart and make you feel so happy? This isn't one of them.

This book really broke my heart and made me infinitely sadder than I was before I started it but isn't that the mark of a good book?

The protagonist here is in prison and it's not until the closing pages when we find out why. Before that we are taken through his life from early childhood to the time he is imprisoned. We are also given an insight into his life in prison sharing his cell with some who is "half-guilty" of murder.

The story is simple but ultimately heart breaking and when we get to the end I just felt so sorry for him and although I don't condone his actions, boy do I understand them.

A really well written effort from what is clearly a talented writer.

Thanks to Netgalley and Quercus Books, MacLehose Press for an ARC of the English translation of this book in exchange for an honest review