Gilbert La Rocque, son of Charles-Edouard La Rocque and Lucie Savard La Rocque, was born in Rosemont, Quebec, studied at the Ecole Brébeuf, moved to Montréal-Nord at the age of eleven, took five years of the cours classique, then went to work at a series of more or less menial and, for him, disagreeable jobs-tinsmith, like his father, construction worker, bank employee, city clerk--which he was finally able to give up when he entered publishing in 1970. By this time La Rocque had already begun the writing of the six novels, published over the next fourteen years, which are his chief claim to fame as a Quebec writer. He became editor in chief of Editions de l'Homme in 1972 and a founding member of VLB Editeur in 1975, but he moved to the post of literary director at Editions de l'Aurore in that year and became literary...