Trente Arpents

Trente Arpents (1938) is a novel that breaks with the tradition of the regional idyll by portraying the Canadien farmer as a tragic rather than a romantic figure and presents Québec rural life as subject at once to the vagaries of climate and the impact of urbanization. Under the pseudonym "Ringuet," author Philippe Panneton dramatizes Euchariste Moisan's fall from youthful prosperity, married to his farm, to impoverished old age, trapped in an American factory town. Conflicts between generations are equally pervasive in the country and the city; rural life before WWI is only marginally better than city life. Claiming to write realism rather than naturalism, Panneton employs the seasons as a symbolic and structuring device in order to reveal the frailty of human hopes compared to the indifferent but powerful forces of nature and time. The novel was awarded prizes in both France and Québec; Felix and Dorothea Walter's translation, Thirty Acres, won the Governor General's Award in 1940. It has also been translated into German.