We all knew him during high school—that 17-year-old notebook-toting sage, feeling deeply, spouting out tiny poems, acting just a little too wise for his age—but, despite the factors belying it, still being a 17-year-old. Frederick Langlois, the protagonist of Mercury Under the Tongue, is of that ilk, a younger Kerouac with a sweet nihilism, a strong sense of family ties, and a lingering (if sometimes resentful) sense of responsibility to others.

The book traces a short span of the protagonist's life in a hospital ward peopled with acutely ill adolescents, as they sneak out to go see the newborns in the maternity ward and play games of imagination where they cast themselves as already being in Purgatory. The book travels from his distant but fond relationship with his therapist (and his mute delight at catching a glimpse of her cleavage), through comic moments on the hospital ward, his developing camaraderie with other patients of his age, the survival of some, the loss of others, a brief glimpse of romantic love, and a final reckoning with himself and his family, which is both dispassionate and deeply felt.

While the chosen topic seems an invitation to made-for-TV-movie sentimentality, the treatment of the topic is delicate and at times acerbic, avoiding the pitfalls that could have taken a less adept author too far into moaning and histrionics or into misty stoicism. We have the teen prankster, who shoves a Cracker Jack under his foreskin in hopes of horrifying the nurses with his new "tumor," and who subsequently gets chided by the doctors for taking illness so lightly and showing such disrespect for the other patients. The other patients, however, are delighted and entertained.

This last episode reveals that the "caretakers" take bodily degeneration much more seriously than do the patients, who are burdened by the adults' need for the kids to conduct themselves dolefully but calmly in the face of their facing death, but never mentioning it by name. The protagonist, however, in a gesture of defiance, or at least of an acceptance nobody else seems to demonstrate, alarms his therapist by renaming himself after a 17th century Italian poet named, remarkably, Metastasio.

Rich with feeling but pleasantly unsentimental, Mercury Under the Tongue doesn't shy from the fallible body as the humanizing factor that grounds adolescent talk of spirit. In grounding it, it creates a believable, likable protagonist, and crafts a compelling, poetic story.

Sylvain Trudel is a Quebecois writer born in Montreal in 1963. After studying science and cinema, he has devoted himself to writing full-time since 1985. He is the author of six novels for adults, of which Mercury Under the Tongue is the fourth and the most widely translated. He has also written numerous books for children and young adults.

As literary translator, SHEILA FISCHMAN has translated from French to English more than a hundred works from major Quebec novelists, including Gaitan Soucy, Anne Hibert, Sylvain Trudel, Jacques Poulin, Marie-Claire Blais, Yves Beauchemin, Lise Bissonnette, Elise Turcotte, Jacques Savoie and Michel Tremblay. Winner of many prestigious award, she received the Governor General's Book Award for translation (1998) for Bambi and Me, a translation of Les vues animees by Michel Tremblay. SHEILA FISCHMAN directed the literature section of the Montreal Star and has written literary columns for several English newspapers. Appointed to the Order of Canada in 2000, she's a founding member of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada and received two honorary degrees, one from the University of Ottawa, and the other from the University of Waterloo.

Because of me, lives are turned upside down and it bothers me a lot to upset everyone's routine. My mother has given up her job, now she can come and see me waste away a little more every day, with her poor smiles. She tries to be cheerful, light-hearted, and I see her teeth stained brown by cigarettes and coffee, but I'm well aware that her heart isn't in it. I can see that at home, her eyes weep: they're the unimaginable color of sleepless nights, ringed with the salt of tears and clouded by small red blood vessels burst into angels' hair. My mother doesn't want to lose me and I don't want to lose life, but we lose everything. Though I struggle against the current in the raging river of the world, I am myself a world turned upside-down, the scent that returns to a flower after it has floated around houses, a tree that goes back into the earth, the stifled cry of men. The universe wants it, the universe wants me, and I ask myself: can I really fight with my bare hands those colossal mountains that scrape against the moon? Sometimes, in front of all the long, sad faces that come to spoon-feed me their regrets, I feel that I ought to cry, that I'm performing in a melodrama, but I can't help it and everything happens as if nothing will be amiss. It's too close, my snout is pressed against the door of the dead and I still can't see that it's all over.

That's where I am, huddled up in my last entrenched position, because this filthy disgusting thing is ravaging my body: an evil guinea pig is racing like some demented idiot in its rotating cage, in the heart of my guts, and the little Satan is chewing away at my bones, especially my right hip, the wing of my pelvis that has thinned down dramatically with the years. Quite recently a surgeon disembowelled me so as to slip inside my person and scrape my bones with the devil knows what kind of plane. When I woke up in the recovery room where everything is bathed in fluorescent light and moaning, the man seemed quite sorry to tell me that my hipbone is a sheet of paper; if you stood a candle behind it you would see the flame through the bone and it would have a bleak and terrible beauty. To thank the surgeon for coming to see my disaster in person, I vomited into a chrome basin shaped like a kidney or a suburban swimming pool.

My own poor little hip, my beautiful skate-wing-shaped bone that I loved, that helped me to live my life, that kept me upright during events, is now nothing more than a frail rice-paper Japanese fan. I feel pain all the way to the head of the femur and my sacral vertebrae, but I can't do anything about it and neither can medicine; which means my imminent collapse and decay.

Since that sad medical discovery which will be irrevocably my undoing, I've moved to the hospital where I do my best to make a little home for myself that's welcoming despite the wheelchair parked along the wall, waiting for me like a limousine, ready to take me to new, short-lived adventures. It will never be the most charming bachelor flat though, that's understood, and I sleep in a cold metal bed that seems to be stuffed with prune pits, a weird and hideous bed in which, come night, sleep won't always come because of the sickening smell of drugs where in any case dreams are always monstrous, given the spirit of the place.