Canadian Pastoral

THE OUTLANDER (290 pp.)--Germaine Guevremont--Whittlesey House ($3).

Everyone was curious about the Stranger but no one ever found out who he was. He had stopped at the Beauchemin's farmhouse one autumn evening to ask for food. When he was invited in to dinner, he stayed on for a year. The Stranger was a great yarner and a great toper but he was also a tremendous worker and he more than earned his keep. Before he left Monk's Inlet, a tiny farm hamlet on the St. Lawrence River in Quebec, he had left his mark on the lives of all who came in contact with him. Old Widower Beauchemin loved him more than he loved his own lazy son, and Neighbor Angelina Desmarais had fallen madly in love with him.

For all his effect on the pious, closefisted French Canadian farm folk of Monk's Inlet, the Stranger is really only a literary device. Canadian Author Germaine Guevremont has used him and his outland ways simply to point up the careful, ordered provincial life of a countryside she describes with affectionate fidelity. The Outlander is a completely unpretentious novel of place, almost entirely without plot, and only incidentally concerned with human characters. Nature broods omnisciently over the story, making even birth and death seem but fragments in a larger design.

Published in 1945, the first half of The Outlander won a Canadian literary award, won another when it was published in France. The Outlander makes no pretense to literary importance. But Madame Guevremont, 53, mother of four children, writes about her paysans and their river farms with calm. Gallic simplicity. Although her awkwardly woven novel has many literary holes, they let in a great deal of the human light that better craftsmen often block out.

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