<p>Winner of the 1979 Governor General’s Award for fiction, Antonine Maillet’s virtuoso creation, <i>The Tale of Don L’Orignal<\/i>, is now back in print. Maillet’s tale begins one day, not so very long ago but back in the youth of the world, when a hay-covered island materialized off shore, an island populated by fleas who soon took human form. The leader of this uncouth crew of have-nots, Don l’Orignal, wore a moose-antler crown as his badge of office. At his right hand were his brave lieutenants: his son, Noume, and his general, Michel-Archange. The general’s wife, the doughty charwoman, spy, and rabble-rouser La Sagouine, had one finger in every pie and one raised to her neighbour, La Sainte.<\/p> <p>The Flea Islanders were constantly at odds with the almost as clever but far more civilized upper crust of the mainland village: the mayoress, the schoolteacher, the merchant, the banker. When they invaded and tried to steal a keg of molasses, the outcome of the mock-heroic battle was unclear, except that La Sainte’s son, the hapless young Citrouille, and Adeline, the merchant’s lovely daughter, had fallen in love.<\/p> <p>With the insider’s accumulation of oral history, gossip, and shrewd hindsight, Antonine Maillet has conjured up a fictional Acadia that her ancestors would relish. Perhaps those who could read it would have even understood it: she wrote Don l’Orignal in a version of 16th-century domestic French that she adapted for modern readers. In this far-fetched, but always entertaining fable, Maillet holds up a mirror to Acadian history and to an all too fallible human nature.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
<p>Winner of the 1979 Governor General’s Award for fiction, Antonine Maillet’s virtuoso creation, <i>The Tale of Don L’Orignal<\/i>, is now back in print. Maillet’s tale begins one day, not so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":54882,"template":"","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"product_brand":[],"product_cat":[12776],"product_tag":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-63531","1":"product","2":"type-product","3":"status-publish","4":"has-post-thumbnail","5":"product_language-eng-fr","6":"product_subjects-literary-fr","7":"product_subjects-fiction-fr","8":"product_reading_range-19-fr","9":"product_reading_range-20-fr","10":"product_reading_range-21-fr","11":"product_reading_range-16-fr","12":"product_reading_range-17-fr","13":"product_reading_range-18-fr","14":"product_interest_range-21-fr","15":"product_interest_range-16-fr","16":"product_interest_range-17-fr","17":"product_interest_range-18-fr","18":"product_interest_range-19-fr","19":"product_interest_range-20-fr","20":"product_grade_range-tenth-grade-fr","21":"product_grade_range-eleventh-grade-fr","22":"product_grade_range-twelfth-grade-fr","23":"product_curriculumsubject-english-curriculum-subjects-fr","24":"product_provincial_focus-i-p-e","25":"product_provincial_focus-nb-fr","26":"product_provincial_focus-n-e","27":"product_edi_priority_areas-genre","28":"product_edi_priority_areas-races-et-ethnies","29":"product_edi_priority_areas-situation-socioeconomique","30":"product_edi_author-autrice","31":"product_edi_author-acadian-author-fr","32":"product_edi_history_culture-culture-et-histoire-acadiennes","33":"product_edi_subjects_themes-influence-portugaise-au-canada","34":"product_edi_subjects_themes-justice-et-injustice","35":"product_edi_characters-acadian-characters-fr","36":"biblio_share_tag-fiction-literary-fr","37":"product_cat-abc-fr-2","38":"product_shipping_class-abc-test-fr","39":"entry","41":"first","42":"instock","43":"taxable","44":"shipping-taxable","45":"purchasable","46":"product-type-simple"},"yoast_head":"\n