Like all of Dany Laferrière’s autobiographical novels, there’s a whimsical nonchalance, a combination of simplicity and circumspection, that tends to underwhelm readers. Perhaps this has to do with the kind of temporality that Laferrière explores in his work. Through a pastiche of memoir and anecdote, history and make-believe, Laferrière holds the past out in front like a slippery still-beating heart. And so, two books of transplanted moments that, with time, may become as haunting and celebratory as a full recovery.

A Drifting Year finds Haitian expatriate Laferrière plagued by his recollections. In this short novel written in stanzas, the young exile arrives in the unfamiliar city of Montreal. Here, he quickly discovers all the things endemic to the Canadian immigrant experience; racism, poverty, and disorientation plague the budding writer.

Thankfully, Laferrière uses these hardships not as the sole concern of the book, but as a backdrop for his aspirations as a young lover. In fluid, self-effacing prose (translated from the French by another Montrealer, David Homel) Laferrière disdains work, covets booze and women, and stews the pigeons he catches in the park. With the candour of Charles Bukowski but not the crudeness, he flits around the city, quits his factory job, and stares out the window at his first snowstorm – “more impressive than the sea, but less moving.”

A Drifting Year is replete with guileless images, snapshot moments, and the kind of deadpan sadness that could easily be confused for irony. Similar to Austin Clarke’s When Women Rule, it has the moral authority of experience, but, because it refuses to burden readers with the weight of recrimination and self-pity, it reads as the fairly conventional memoir of a would-be writer down on his luck.

Guilty of penning an exile’s memoir that barely mentions the country he left behind, Laferrière provides readers a counterpoint to A Drifting Year in the more immediate but, one suspects, equally recidivist Down Among the Dead Men. Some 20 years later, Laferrière’s exile is over. He returns to Haiti to see his family, his old friends, his former loves. A wiser, sadder version of the young man who made his solitary way through Montreal, his deadpan wit is still in evidence as he recounts the exploits of his old friends, and the joy his mother and his aunt express at his return to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.

Gradually, in a series of epigraphic meetings and discussions, Laferrière spirals into the central premise of this novel: absence as a kind of death from which one might never emerge. He meets his aunt’s godfather, who asks him, “How you can write about the dead when you’ve never been dead?” He is subsequently offered the chance to cross over to the other side – and return. He discusses the matter with an embittered professor, and weighs the opinions of his aunt and mother (whose elaborate theories about zombies connote a country undermined by senseless death and endemic uncertainty). So, will Laferrière cheat time and follow the god Legba – “he who shows the way” – to the other world?

Here is an author at his best when fiction and memoir exploit each other. The dreamscape at the end of the longer novel easily eclipses the cold streets of Montreal and the stinking slums of Port-au-Prince. If A Drifting Year is exploratory surgery, Dead Men is life-saving trauma. Despite all advances in medicine, time will not be cheated. Only writers like Laferrière can hope to make the living walk the earth forever.