Le repaire des solitudes par Danny Émond (review)

in the novel who do their utmost to avoid looking at the truth, we allow ourselves to hope that the description of Philippe and Claire’s adolescent bedroom is without importance (34) and that the photo of Claire, Philippe, their mother, and the infant Marie is just a family portrait (42). And then there are the drops of blood (57). Un été en famille is, among other things, a mystery novel whose ending needs to be discovered, not revealed. Read to the end, if you can. Metropolitan State University of Denver Ann Williams Émond, Danny. Le repaire des solitudes. Montréal: Boréal, 2015. ISBN 978-2-76462363 -3. Pp. 160. $20 Can. Literary newcomer Émond’s dark side has a heart, even if in the path there is all horror and loneliness. Take the narrator of “Manque d’oxygène,” whose mother has just committed suicide. Every night for three months, he dreams of her hanging from the kitchen ceiling, her mouth gripping a light bulb that casts a blue light on her face: “Je vois bien qu’elle voudrait me parler de mon père, mais l’ampoule l’en empêche” (101). Next, her eyeballs fall out of their sockets and drop into his bowl of cereal, followed by her skin and organs. She remains a skeleton, and the light bulb goes out. She laughs, and he wakes up. Gruesome. Then comes the heart. Alone on his twentyfifth birthday because all the people he knows are“plus ou moins fous”(103), he blows out the candles on the cake he has bought for himself. His birthday wish: head to the dépanneur to buy some lottery tickets. “Sans oser dire à la fille derrière le comptoir à quel point je la trouve jolie,”he says in the story’s final sentence,“même si elle ne sourit jamais”(104). Émond has a gift for this double-punch. It works like this: first, a glimpse at the off-kilter life of a depressed or marginal character. Usually it is in a story’s first sentence: “Mon père avait des seins et ma mère, une moustache” (11); “La pauvreté, c’est moche”(23);“Dans le cirque de la drague, je suis le clown qui mange des claques sur la gueule”(89). The character’s surroundings are almost always equally edgy: dirty apartments, the back seats of cars, Tim Hortons stores late at night, garages, alleys outside nightclubs. Émond’s descriptions are wonderful: in“Les lèvres anonymes,”the narrator foreshadows an illicit encounter by describing a woman’s hair as “si crépue et foisonnante qu’elle pourrait sans peine y cacher un dildo. Ou une machette” (61). Sex and violence intermingle a lot in Émond’s more figurative language, but nimbly— it’s like watching a train wreck about to happen but knowing that there will be something slapstick about the way things will knock into one another. This style feels like a form of kindness. As gruesome or pornographic as his stories can be on the surface, their depths always bend toward the humane. After a surprisingly gratifying tryst with a stranger, a narrator sighs: “La vie n’est qu’une série de départs, n’est-ce pas?” (45). An old man exhibits his ugly, still-scarred tattoo to anyone who will look, prompting the narrator to note, “on s’accroche à ce qu’on peut, dans la vie, surtout 260 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 261 quand on n’a rien” (59). The book’s final tale imagines a couple’s life together as a series of physical breakdowns, of a march toward a near-oblivion in which“on existera, c’est tout” (151)—after which, we turn the page to see, in “Remerciements,” Émond thanks his parents—for the second time in the book (153). Even in their obvious darkness, these characters and situations suggest a deeply empathic storytelling impulse. University of Wisconsin, Madison Ritt Deitz Garcin, Jérôme. Le voyant. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ISBN 978-2-07-014164-7. Pp. 185. 17,50 a. This novel centers on the rather incredible life of Jacques Lusseyran, a man whose relatively brief existence...