The Little Eater of Bleeding Hearts

“The Little Eater of Bleeding Hearts is a testimony of a milieu and of an era that history has no right to erase.” ANTONINE MAILLET

Very rarely do Americans dare to write in French nowadays. The author, Norman Beaupré, has a special talent for doing so. He's the one who translated his original autobiographical novel, Le Petit Mangeur de Fleurs(The Little Eater of Flowers), with a sensitivity to words as well as an exceptional authenticity in expressing his thoughts on his own growing up. One could easily say that it is the merger of the simplicity of a child with the wisdom of one who has struggled to maintain his own cultural identity as a Francophone writer. The author revealed, during one interview in France, that he found the work authentic for many reasons but especially because he had to recollect memories from long past that were, and still are, painful to him.

The Francophone population of New England laments the erosion of its language and culture. Each one struggles in his own way attempting to remain faithful to the collective identity they grew up with. Norman Beaupré, while playing with words and sometimes with bleeding hearts, dares to become, by doing so, one of the standard bearers of the ethnic group to which he belongs. This work not only touches upon memories of growing up but the very lives with which the author came into contact from as far as he can remember up to his late teens. A work of cultural richness and pride(fierté), as a reader from Dijon, France, once expressed to the author at a Salon du Livre that he attended in 2007.