Bilodo lives a solitary life, performing his duty as a postman before dodging his only friend’s attempts to drag him out for a night on the town, instead preferring to head home to be by himself.
Unbeknownst to his colleagues, however, Bilodo has a clandestine hobby. For in the secrecy of his own home, he slowly opens select pieces of post to immerse himself in the lives of strangers, skipping between recipients like changing the channel on his television. But there is one conversation he adores the most, an exchange of poetry between a reclusive man named Grandpré and a beautiful woman from Guadeloupe called Ségolène. She crafts thoughtful and evocative haiku, and Bilodo has gradually fallen in love with her, his every moment taken up with waiting for her next composition. But when an accident happens on his route, this soon turns into more than an obsession for Bilodo, as he attempts to take Grandpré’s place in Ségolène’s affections by trying to emulate his life.
It’s a beautiful and thoughtful novel, with notes of Murakami hanging in the air, as introspective Bilodo dreams and worries about his life and the love he seeks, blind to all others – even the lovely waitress at the cafe he frequents. His slow descent down the rabbit hole is matched by his knowledge and immersion into another way of life, via Zen and the art of haiku. The haiku themselves form a backbone for the novel, short, beautiful and often with a wistful edge that sticks in the mind. What is particularly impressive is the way Thériault handles the two very different styles of haiku that Ségolène and Grandpré compose, as well as Bilodo’s growth from stilted amateur to talented poet.
Although set in Montreal, the novel exudes a certain Parisian air, bringing to mind the whimsical notion of love found in French classics like Amélie; with Bilodo having something in common with Amelie’s love interest and his fixation on collecting the Polaroids left in the bins around passport booths. It’s an ode to the nearly lost art of letter-writing and calligraphy, as the instant and often disposable world of email is thrown aside and replaced by the more permanent and meaningful notion of composing words and putting them down in ink. It is an affecting novel that will give you plenty to ponder, as well as encouraging you to put pen to paper yourself. I’ll finish with an attempt to review the book in haiku:
Wistful turn of phrase
obsession takes over
the postman succumbs to fate