Volkswagen Blues

Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues is a road-trip novel in the tradition of Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece, On the Road. Originally published in French in 1984, it chronicles the North American journey of Jack Waterman, a francophone writer from Quebec City, and a young woman of French and Indigenous American ancestry named La Grande Sauterelle. They are both on a quest of self-discovery, but their expedition from Quebec to San Francisco is also an allegory for Quebec’s struggles to define itself culturally and politically. Volkswagen Blues was nominated for the Governor General’s Award for French-language fiction in 1984. Its English-language version, translated by Sheila Fischman, first appeared in 1988.

Plot Summary

At age 40, a French Canadian writer who uses the pen name Jack Waterman has published five novels, but none of them satisfy him. Lacking inspiration to write another book, he sets out from Quebec City in his Volkswagen to find his brother, Théo, whom he hasn’t seen in 15 years. In Gaspé, the northern Quebec town from which Théo sent Jack his last postcard years ago, Jack meets La Grande Sauterelle, a 21-year-old “Métis” (part white and part Indigenous).