Sadie X: The Playlist
Sadie X: The Playlist is here!
Clara Dupuis-Morency, author of Sadie X (translated by Aimee Wall) has curated a wonderful playlist to accompany her novel. She has also selected a short passage from Sadie X that can be read before, during, or after listening!
“Headphones on, Sadie is deep in her microscope, inside a bubble that vibrates to the rhythm of the playlist Molly sent her. She taps out the beat in Vivien Goldman’s “Launderette” and then skips to Stereo Total’s “Troglodyten,” going underground to forget the law of the sun for a while. Molly sends her playlists and Sadie doesn’t even look at the artists. There’s rarely anything familiar. She needs a musical environment to work, to isolate herself from the reset of the world, but she has no curiosity, neither the inclination nor the energy to seek out new sounds for herself. She enjoys making her way through other people’s tastes. This is the tacit agreement she has with Molly, who passes on her discoveries, stringing them together to create little sensory wonders, she knows exactly what Sadie needs to concentrate, even if Molly never thinks of it that way, she never thinks of Sadie when she creates a playlist. Sadie settles into the indifference that brushes past her just as she would slip into another person’s clothes, another person’s skin. Molly is the ideal dealer of sound, something not everyone can do. It takes both basic selfishness and infinite generosity to know how to give the most central desire. A DJ who tries to please other people is useless, they’ll bomb every time. You’re either a dealer or you’re a whore, you have to choose. Molly only passes on her best shit, the stuff that gets her high. She’s not the slightest bit interested in other people’s desires. Sadie infiltrates that high, slips into those underground passages carved out by a curiosity she lacks. She gets her fix by entering someone else’s home through the keyhole” (49-50).
Find the full Spotify playlist here.
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Clara Dupuis-Morency was born in Quebec City and lives in Montreal. Her first novel, Mère d’invention, was a finalist for Prix des libraires du Québec, Prix du CALQ–Work by an Emerging Artist, and for the France-Québec prize, Les Rendez-vous du premier roman. She also works as a translator and is the mother of twin girls.
Newfoundland-native Aimee Wall is a writer and translator. Her essays, short fiction, and criticism have appeared in numerous publications, including Maisonneuve, Matrix Magazine, the Montreal Review of Books, and Lemon Hound. Wall’s translations include Vickie Gendreau’s novels Testament (2016), and Drama Queens (2019), and Sports and Pastimes by Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard (2017). Her acclaimed debut novel, We, Jane was nominated for nine literary prizes including the Amazon Canada First Novel Award, the BMO Winterset Award, the ReLit Award for Fiction, and the Scotiabank Giller Prize longlist. Wall lives in Montreal.
