« La demande était pas mal corpo au début, » says Alain Farah with a laugh. He is anything but. Farah teaches in the department of French languages and literature at McGill. He’s also the author of a novel called Pourquoi Bologne that came out in French in 2013 and appeared in English in 2015 under the title Ravenscrag. The work tells a fractured, spinning kind of story about a writer called Alain Farah who works at McGill in 1962 and in 2012. In the novel, there are episodes, both in 1962 and 2012, where the character Alain Farah wanders around the McGill campus, clearly in bad shape.