Pivot

In the psychiatric wing of Montreal’s Holy Mother Mary Hospital, Pivot, a.k.a. Hadrien Jalbert, is waiting for the umpteenth incarceration engineered by the dark forces of “the System” that’s been persecuting him for years to come to an end.

His companions in misfortune are completely stir crazy, but Pivot likes them all the same. There’s Jesus, a young Haitian who thinks he’s the son of God; The Alleycat, an ageless hobo who talks to Lilliputians in a languageonly he knows; Jonathan Livingston, who was committed because he wanted to launch himself from the top of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge; and, of course, The Stranger, Mary, an Inuit from Nunavik haunted by the desperate cries of the dying people she hears in the walls, in the ground and in her belly. Pivot, who earned the name of a famous French literary TV host because he’s educated and voluble, can’t find the words to help her.