[Les cahiers de céline 03] • The Blue Notebook

When Fine Dumas’s notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down after Expo 67, Celine is condemned to go back to working as a waitress at the Select, attending to the frustrated appetites and exquisite pathos of its exotic clientele. Then a newcomer appears, the gorgeous Gilbert Forget, a musician who is not insensitive to her charms. Celine, a midget who has always thought she was unworthy, never having imagined the possibility of a mature loving and sexual relationship in her life, throws herself into a passionate affair with Gilbert, discovering the body’s thrills for the first time. Hanging out with his new crowd of artists and performers, she gets a backstage look at a project that’s going to revolutionize Quebec show business and become emblematic of its 1960s culture.

As she has done twice before, Celine records the events and adventures of her life in a notebook. But now, inspired by the agony and ecstasy of first love, she reaches for the heights of romantic prose: while The Black Notebook, her first, is a simple daily journal; and The Red Notebook, her second, is a memory book, in which she records her life in retrospect embellished with rhetorical commentary; in The Blue Notebook Celine steps outside of herself, using a narrator to tell her story. Having finally discovered herself, she is now also finally free of that self. Will her tempestuous relationship with Gilbert endure? Will there be a fourth installment?