What Gabrielle Roy has … accomplished in La Route d'Altamont is to place together in a close rapport a young and an old person, both of whom express a deep need to communicate and to understand one another. In the four "short stories" that compose what the author has classified as a novel, the reader sees a narrator, Christine, first as an eight-year-old child in her relationships with her eighty-year-old grandmother and then with the eighty-four-year-old Monsieur Sanit-Hilaire, and, in the final story, as a mature woman, desirous of communicating with her seventy-year-old mother. (pp. 457-58)

It is … themes of memory and death which are so vivid to the characters of La Route d'Altamont and which Gabrielle Roy succeeds in rendering so vivid to her own readers.

There are several distinct levels of memory to be found throughout La Route d'Altamont. All of them, however, are closely interwoven into...