One of the stories in Raymond Bock’s “Atavismes: Histoires” transposes events from Quebec’s October Crisis, in 1970, to the new century. Photography by AP

In the prologue to his now-iconic “Two Solitudes,” Hugh MacLennan professed to have written “a novel of Canada.” The book was published in 1945, and one can imagine the patriotic enthusiasm that the comment may have sparked among readers hungry for tales of the triumphant homeland. Today, on the other hand, such a claim would sound not only ostentatious but redundant: CanLit, as we often call it, having flailed in the nineteen-seventies through an adolescent phase full of anxious self-definition, is now generally thought to include any work by a Canadian citizen. All our novels are “of Canada,” whether they’re about Kamloops, or Cambodia, or no place at all.

MacLennan, in that same prologue, claimed that “Two Solitudes_”__ _spoke to the experience of “both races … of the country,” meaning the linguistic “races” of English and French. The novel, about a half-Anglo, half-Franco character whose crisis of identity mirrored the nation’s, won the first of MacLennan’s five Governor General’s Literary Awards, and its title became shorthand for what was thought of as Canada’s primary social divide. (Never mind the one between settlers and indigenous people.)

In MacLennan’s day, Ontario was consolidating its position as the nation’s economic and cultural heartland. That it shared a border with Quebec heightened a mythos of disconnection: separatism, many feared, would physically disrupt the entire country, severing the Maritimes and Newfoundland into distant satellites of the Great Dominion. As Canada’s industrial center has shifted west and multiculturalism has thrown dichotomous equations of nationhood for a loop, the drama of Quebec separatism has abated. Twenty years ago, a referendum on Quebec sovereignty failed; last year, the Parti Québécois was soundly defeated by the federalist Liberal Party in the provincial election. In between those two events, in 2006, Governor General Michaëlle Jean declared, “The time of ‘two solitudes’ has passed. Now is the time to focus on promoting national solidarity.”

Despite tapering enmities, though, the dynamic between Canada’s Francophone and Anglophone communities remains less one of cohesion than indifference and estrangement. Dialogue between Quebec and the rest of North America, to which English Canada might provide a conduit, is practically nonexistent. This is partly a language issue, as few Canadians outside Quebec—save some enclaves in New Brunswick, Ontario, and Manitoba—are fluent in French. But it also has to do with the particular codes of Québécois society. Quebec’s cultural insularity protects its language and culture from outside influence—and so, for instance, the province has its own TV, film, and pop-music celebrities, completely distinct from those of Hollywood, while the pop culture of Ontario is almost entirely American.

The “inward-looking, even parochial” literature of the province provides “a window on the Quebec psyche,” according to Peter McCambridge, a translator in Quebec City who runs an English-language Web site called Quebec Reads. But French-Canadian literature rarely crosses over to English-language readers—and McCambridge has a theory as to why. “Quebec finds itself too exotic to be easily digested by the Canadian and U.S. market,” he told me via e-mail, “but not exotic enough to compete with the appeal of something new from Indonesia or Iceland. To North American readers, especially, I think it’s at once too different and too familiar.”

There are, of course, Québécois writers who have enjoyed success in translation. Nicole Brossard, shortlisted for the 2007 Griffin Prize, is widely regarded as one of Canada’s best poets; Michel Tremblay’s “Les Belles Soeurs_”_ was rendered in Scots dialect for a production in Edinburgh; and Roch Carrier’s “The Hockey Sweater_”__ _is a foundational text in almost every Canadian classroom. Still, their global reputations are nothing compared to those of Anglophone Quebec writers such as Mordecai Richler and Mavis Gallant. Tellingly, Yann Martel writes in English rather than his native French.

Raymond Bock’s “Atavismes: Histoires,” the winner of Quebec’s Prix Adrienne-Choquette in 2012, and now available in English thanks to Dalkey Archive’s Applied Literary Translation Program, is the latest work of fiction that could help improve the situation. But readers will need to break through its decidedly specific references: the book, a collection of thirteen short stories, makes few concessions to those unfamiliar with the particulars of Quebec culture—a helpful appendix explains joual cursing (in which equivalents of “chalice” and “host” are two of the most vile expletives) and French Canadian touchstones such as the Quiet Revolution, les filles du roi, and the folksinger Paul Piché. These are stories from a place with its own unique codes—and by embracing this unapologetically French-Canadian spirit, they might, per McCambridge’s paradox, be just “exotic enough” to appeal to a broader North American readership.

In Pablo Strauss’s commendable English adaptation, Bock’s language crackles with the energy of a Québécois folk song, impassioned and celebratory but also melancholy and cheekily ironic. The first story, “Wolverine,” opens things with a statement of purpose: “It’s always been about the words for me,” an unnamed narrator declares, before detailing his gang’s abduction and torture of a Liberal cabinet minister. The echoes are historical—the October Crisis of 1970, which culminated in Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau instituting the War Measures Act to contain separatist hostilities, was hastened, in part, by similar kidnappings. Yet, transposed to the new century, the episode becomes less an act of revolution than a purging of personal impotence and its attendant anger. In a time of political indifference and “tired FLQ graffiti that didn’t scare people anymore” (the Front de Libération du Québec, a separatist paramilitary group, fell into decline after 1971), the young men must remind their captive why they’re beating him:

He needed his memory jogged to grasp the full extent of the excellent work done by him and his brothers in arms, that gang of scumbags who voted in whatever laws they felt like on the backs of us Quebecers, poor suckers who’ve been ceding ground since time immemorial…

The final act of brutality in “Wolverine” is as shocking and gratuitous as it is deflating; the young radicals flee the scene without vindication but, instead, with a sense of irrevocable loss. The group splinters and all that remains is this story, a document that the narrator claims, with a tone of faintly pathetic defiance, is “the truest account and the one that reads best.”

A sense of inevitable failure recurs throughout the book. In “Dauphin, Manitoba,” a young misanthrope wades through the detritus of a ruined relationship, likening himself to “the trapper who falls in a covered foxhole and twists his ankle.” The stresses of fatherhood appear in multiple stories; “Worm” and “The Still Traveller” both feature a contemporary protagonist inheriting his family home. Quebec’s legacy of defeat—going back, really, to the French and Indian War—bears down on all of the book’s characters, and the act of writing becomes an assertion of selfhood against the backdrop of an inescapable past.