À l’état sauvage by Robert Lalonde (review)

Reviews 267 offre ou menace lui aussi de tuer—en fantasme ou en réalité, il est difficile de le savoir—et à la fin lui aussi passerait à l’acte, ostensiblement encouragé par la tuerie de Nosferatu. Kwahulé fait ainsi, dans une certaine mesure, un portait de la société actuelle où des jeunes pleins d’imagination et d’énergie se trouvent soudain sans repères. Cette énergie, Kwahulé la communique superbement dans sa narration fluide où se mélangent parfois dans une seule phrase musiques, publicités, actualités et dialogues. L’important n’est sans doute pas de déterminer la réalité des faits relatés, mais de s’immiscer dans le rythme de cet univers raconté. De ce point de vue le roman est une réussite. Mount Allison University (NB, Canada) Mark D. Lee LALONDE, ROBERT. À l’état sauvage. Montréal: Boréal, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7646-23763 . Pp. 163. $20 Can. Seven chapters, each of which could be an independent short story, form a novel tracing the emotional and sentimental journey of the narrator, a writer in his forties who has recently lost his father and another man he loved. “Écrivain relativement connu” (56), he lives alone in a rural area of Quebec in a house he wants to sell, but book tours and other circumstances bring him into contact with one male figure in each chapter who reflects his own past or points to his future. Two are lively young boys who, like him, are not“comme les autres”(136); another is an eccentric neighbor whose family has rejected him.A friend of his father’s living in the village the narrator grew up in tells him a disturbing story about that father. Later the narrator encounters a boyhood friend, Étienne, whom he had idolized decades earlier in collège and who has recognized himself, somewhat transformed, in at least four of the narrator’s novels (Étienne reminds me of the precocious Nelson in Lalonde’s disturbing Que vais-je devenir jusqu’à ce que je meure?). Not surprisingly, the adult Étienne is not happy that in those books“ce qui est caché”does not“rester caché”(58). In another chapter, Gilles, a former philosophy teacher at a Cégep (pre-university college) who is now an auto mechanic, tells the narrator about losing the man he loved in a terrible accident. In the final chapter Jim Norris, a lover of horses and a convicted murderer, seems to provide the narrator with the home and comfort he needs, and Jim hopes that when he is released from prison they can“recommencer à l’état sauvage”(162). These tales, then, focus increasingly on male bonding and love and on the distance that these men and boys feel from society in general. There is less celebration of nature than in some of Lalonde’s previous fiction, such as Le fou du père, but the countryside is still handsomely painted. The narration is in educated French with Québécois vocabulary including épinettes and orignans, while the dialog covers a wide range of usage and grammar. Here, for example, is Gilles:“T’es la vedette de c’te salon-là, ça fait que gardeto é une p’tite gêne, Victor Hugo en veste de cuir!” (95), and here Jim: “J’étais pas en amour, it was just a fling” (155). There are some clear connections between the narrator and Lalonde, such as the fact that one of the narrator’s books has a wooden bird on its cover (as does Lalonde’s Le seul instant). Lalonde, though, is not only a novelist but a Cégep professor of theater, an actor on stage and in television and films, a translator and adaptor, and a significantly more successful author than this narrator seems to be. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Laplace,Yves. Plaine des héros. Paris: Fayard, 2015, ISBN 978-2-213-68591-5. Pp. 351. 19 a. C’est une litote d’affirmer que Plaine de héros raconte une histoire compliquée. De nombreux personnages sont évoqués, si bien qu’il est difficile de comprendre leur lien avec le sujet, et les...