Listening for Jupiter
"You should read Listening for Jupiter for its beautiful language, engaging dialogue and genuinely unique story, or because it’s whimsical, funny, heartfelt and pleasantly absurd, but I wouldn’t blame you if you read it because you’re thirsty for queer representation."
Listening for Jupiter
Pierre-Luc Landry
Translated from the French by Arielle Aaronson and Madeleine Stratford
Montréal, QcFiction
2017
Winner, Expozine Best Book Award 2018
Shortlisted, ReLit Awards 2017
Set in London, Bilbao, Alabama, Montauk, and more, this fresh, international novel weaves the fates of two unlikely friends whose days and nights are filled with movies and music, sleeping pills and shooting stars. A beautiful piece of magical realism with a modern, existential twist. March soon, and it’s already 28°C in Montreal. Hollywood is living a dead-end life working at the local graveyard. Meanwhile, it’s snowing non-stop all over Europe and in Toronto, where Xavier works for a pharmaceutical company he couldn’t care less about. The two meet somewhere in between… only ever in their dreams.
More press coverage
Elise Moser, Montreal Review of Books
"For a book peopled with characters who feel life is empty of meaning, who rely on pilfered pills and large quantities of alcohol for fun, who spend money as fast as they can acquire it in a desperate search for some kind of satisfaction, Listening for Jupiter and its denizens are unexpectedly sweet and appealing. The tone of Listening for Jupiter is somehow gentle bildungsroman more than fierce dystopia."
Andrew Forbes, Literary Review of Canada
"[Listening for] Jupiter is a cockeyed chronicle of a world only slightly diferent from our own, or perhaps just a few years into our future, when climate change has accelerated and done permanent harm to the old seasonal rhythms. Weather is destabilized, and with it seemingly these characters’ sense of reality. Dreams are indistinguishable from memory, and characters disappear without warning, only to turn up halfway around the globe, still retaining intimate knowledge of one another’s lives. And down atop all of them rains a steady celestial precipitation— meteorites, shooting stars, bits of space debris that fall to Earth, leaving craters, damaging buildings, frequently setting of explosions."
Jade Colbert, The Globe and Mail
"Pierre-Luc Landry's magic-realist novel [...] [is a] deceptively light story about two men sorting out the conundrums of themselves, it leaves much to consider – on perception, reality, synchronicity and meaning – after the final page."
Publisher’s Weekly
"The novel is a fantastical and partly fragmentary blend of science fiction [...], climate change fiction [...], and surreal dream writing [...]. This adventurous, improbable novel, which leaves readers wondering whether the two characters are, in fact, two different destinies of the same person, is an intelligent take on a hybrid of literary and genre writing."
Ischell, Reading in Translation
"Listening for Jupiter is a chatty, whimsical book. [...] One could say that Landry has written a quintessentially millennial book, a book in which the two young male protagonists are trapped in their own heads, their own parallel lives and monologues. They are dreamers, capable of meeting each other only in dreams—at least until the well-primed conclusion. Landry’s most evident talent is for dialogue [...]."
James M. Fisher, The Miramichi Reader
"[...] a masterful accomplishment of creative writing [...]."
Rachel Cordasco, Speculative Fiction in Translation
"If you’ve been looking for a novel that explores the underpinnings of reality, the material of dreams, and the almost-mystical revelations we sometimes have while just living our lives, then you need to get yourself a copy of Listening For Jupiter. As a work of magical realism, Landry’s novel is especially intriguing for its multiple and overlapping plot-lines—an existentialist Venn diagram, if you will, in which each of the main characters has his own chapters; and then the two characters meet in other chapters, but only in their dreams."
