Jacques Renaud's "Le casse", translated here as "Broke City", is, if nothing else, an important work in Quebecois literary history, as it was one of the first and certainly the most scandalous novel to have been written in "joual", the street slang of urban Montreal - now nearly extinct. It's not just a novel about a bunch of low-lifes scamming for a living, it was a conscious smack in the face of the Canadian establishment. Joual is, or was, a very strange dialect of French, littered with weird spellings and pronounciations and semi-English words, and Renaud wrote the book in it because it was, he claimed, how he and his friends spoke. This was something of an affront to literary manners at the time, particularly as Renaud was not like Roddy Doyle, whose early books - although written in authentic Dublin English - are essentially benign and comic. Broke City is part rant, part deadpan account of serious alienation. (The narrator kills an enemy by sticking a screwdriver down the guy's throat.)

Renaud was a friend of members of the FLQ, the terrorist group that kidnapped and murdered a Canadian government minister in 1968, and he broadly sympathised with their desire to kick out the jams and raise people's consciousness about the deprived situation of many French-speaking Canadians. Broke City certainly played a part in the process, causing no end of shocked editorials when it was first published. Since then, the French-speakers in Quebec (at any rate) have gained relative economic, social and cultural security, and joual - according to my quebecois friends - is now more of a literary device than a living dialect. (Sounds familiar to an Irish reader tired of fake Paddyisms on the page and the stage.) Still, this is a rocking translation of a wild and violent book, and even if the original effect is rather lost when you read it in English, using urban American slang does lend it a kind of grubby universality. Every big city deserves a book like this, because there's no denying that big cities have lower depths in which people have to live.

An important book. If you like Celine and Hubert Selby, Renaud is more than worth reading.