The unnamed narrator of Lise Tremblay’s Mile End plays the piano for a living, accompanying aspiring singers and ballet dancers. She could do much better if she tried, but she is confused about what she wants out of life. Equally confused is her boyfriend, a hard-drinking junk dealer who calls his archetypal Jewish mother every night just before the national news. The narrator’s own mother is buffed and polished to near-perfection and has lived alone since her father, a famous Quebec television star, walked out on her for a much younger woman.

Quebec author Lise Tremblay successfully puts the reader inside someone else’s skin – the sweaty, bouncing, uncomfortable flesh of the novel’s grossly overweight young woman narrator. Tremblay’s descriptions of what it is like to be too big to fit in a bathtub, and to become soaked with sweat at the least exertion, are brilliant, as are her evocations of Montreal – the summer heat, the winter cold, the mixture of ethnic groups and artsy types that populate the downtown neighbourhood called Mile End.

Tremblay tells her story in short rambling episodes that are by turns amusing, disgusting, and sad. Throughout much of the book, the reader keeps turning pages for the pleasure of listening to the narrator’s voice, though little in the way of a plot unfolds. We learn that her father fled the Northern Quebec town where he grew up. A pianist friend has a great success in Paris. The narrator drinks too much. Her boyfriend drinks too much.

Then in the last 10 pages the little bits of story come together and we see that Tremblay has been leading us toward a whole new meaning of Mile End, the place where everything terminates. Mile End (La Danse juive) won the Governor General’s Award for fiction in the French language category, and translator Gail Scott does an admirable job of capturing the rhythm and humour of the distinctly Montreal dialect.