Says Homel, “The novel is quite obviously a send-up of identity politics, of who you are as a writer and who you are allowed to be in Quebec. It’s a critique of nationalism, especially as it operates in the cultural sector here. But as always with Dany, the point is oblique. He could also be talking about nationalism anywhere.” Or, more personally, how he played the game early on.

With a nod to The Enigma of Arrival, Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul’s autobiographical novel about a young Trinidadian’s youthful discovery of England, L’énigme du retour is cool and elegant, a patrician vision of the established writer’s return to his country of origin, where he might take his place as moral leader and great writer. This time, the narrator has shed his childhood nickname and reverted to Windsor. Awoken by a phone call announcing his long-absent father’s death, he first takes a trip through Quebec, saying goodbye to friends, then swings by New York, where the old man has lived for decades, alone and in poverty. A briefcase left in a bank vault may or may not be important; missing the combination, he elects to leave it behind.

Arriving in Haiti for the funeral (without a body), he stays in a hotel, reconnects with old friends, and has long conversations with his young nephew, Dany, an aspiring writer. The story isn’t about the death of his father, which actually occurred a year before his first novel was published and which he explored in subsequent books. Rather, it’s about stepping into a father’s shoes; about looking at a ravaged nation not as the guilt-ridden son who left, but as a successful patriarch, ready to lend a hand.

Laferrière has visited Haiti more frequently than have the protagonists of his novels. He was there last January for a literary festival when the earthquake hit, and was unable to make contact with his wife in Montreal for days. Close friends lost their lives. He recorded the experience in a notebook as it happened, and a few weeks later published Tout bouge autour de moi (“Everything around me moved”).

A small book written as he criss-crossed the globe, Laferrière’s first-hand testament is vivid, perceptive: sleeping under the stars that first night, knowing that whoever else was alive must be outside, too; holding a rescued baby in his arms; trekking up a hill to find the aged poet Frankétienne still alive and, across the road, his eighty-year-old mother and her sister. And, most tellingly perhaps, walking into a literary event in Brussels shortly afterward, realizing he was not just the famous writer, but Haiti incarnate.

At one point during the days following the earthquake, his nephew notices he’s been taking notes and asks him not to write a novel about it. “I can’t make that promise,” Laferrière quotes himself. “A classical novel that takes place in one location (Port-au-Prince), in one time (4:53 pm), and took as many lives as a war. For that, you need a Tolstoy.”

Which one of them — the boy or his uncle — will be Haiti’s Tolstoy is an open question. In the meantime, Dany Sr. is left to slog it out as an internationally acclaimed writer, attending back-to-back promotional gigs and literary events. By the time I finally catch up with him, at the end of yet another festival where he has presided as the guest of honour, I’ve read so much about and by him, the inevitable interview seems almost redundant. The omnipotent “I” is ringing in my ears; he’s exhausted. Having every reason to beg off, he slumps into a chair in the bar of a downtown Montreal hotel and smiles politely. I open my notebook.

Q: Tell me something about yourself that isn’t in your books.

A: (laughter) I can’t do that. My publisher would be furious. I have to save it.

Q: Is the Dany Laferrière we know from your books a mask?

A: If he is, then I’ve become him. I am my books.

Q: All right, then, tell me: how do you make love to a black guy without getting tired?

(He smiles, then sighs.)

A: Let him do all the work.