Contes violents par Olivier Demers (review)

Reviews 193 les personnages. Deck fait dans l’esquive, des personnages mais aussi du style, avec un emploi instable du “on” et l’alternance au sein d’un même paragraphe de paroles (Solange) et de pensées (Mademoiselle),ou encore de pensées (établir un plan d’attaque pour devenir Bérénice Beaurivage) et d’actions (beurrer ses tartines). Cette voix très personnelle et un dernier rebondissement sauvent un roman par ailleurs assez ennuyeux et qui tient mal les promesses de sa quatrième de couverture. Eastern Connecticut State University Michèle Bacholle-Bošković Demers, Olivier. Contes violents. Montréal: Triptyque, 2014. ISBN 978-2-89031-9462 . Pp. 179. $22 Can. According to one theorist, Hannibal, Spartacus, Napoleon, General Montcalm, and French-Canadian métis rebel Louis Riel had one thing in common: all of them on the verge of total victory, each was tempted to hold back at the wrong moment, by none other than Satan himself. Of course, the theory is historically questionable, and also totally fictional, the“theorist”being the narrator of “L’Adversaire,”the final story in Demers’s fine new collection. Interned in a mental hospital (which is little more than a prison), this unnamed writer pens a long treatise on What Could Have Been, had each of these warriors resisted a last-minute temptation to let up on his coordinated violence against what always seem like worthy targets.Rome,Great Britain,the Canadian federal government: the enemy is always imperial and usually some form of the British Empire.“Que l’odieuse Angleterre ait joué le rôle de championne des libertés lors du dernier conflit mondial,” says the narrator as he closes out his story, “en dit gros sur l’inversement total des valeurs de notre époque” (176). Other characters in this collection reflect on values and beauty—most often as they are caught up in or perpetuating some sort of extreme violence.“Le monde parut enfin s’ouvrir et s’épanouir,” a French émigré reminisces, remembering the joys of mai 68 as he is about to throw himself in front of a subway train in Montreal (143).“Chaque vers en poésie scintille comme une gemme” (103), ponders a hitman, taking a break between contracted murders to remember the vivacious young substitute teacher who revealed the power of poems to him in middle school. In a ranting political tract, a Québécois racist author eloquently shares his admiration of various non-Western “peoples” he has carefully categorized, then condemns the lion’s share of “modern nations,”a“véritable fumier humain” that has “consenti aux mélanges avec des parasites [...] victimes des mille et un bâtards de leurs femelles en rut” (39). Everywhere in this collection, violence abounds—which may be the point. Penned by a philosophy professor at the Cégep de Sherbrooke, Contes violents begins and ends in the spilling of blood. Torturers, warriors, rapists, cannibals, victims of all kinds fill the tales—which span the globe and the centuries—creating a vision of the world that is less philosophical than historical. People are born, forging friendships that later both haunt and save them; revolutions rise and fail; love leads to loss and vice versa, after which everyone suffers and dies; and history rears up everywhere like a wave, bringing all lives with it before inevitably crashing and starting over. The history of Quebec pervades the stories— periodically appearing as two things: a place of asylum and of a failed national destiny. As a place in this fictional world, Quebec feels mired in mediocrity, either by actual victors in war or,more subversively,by the comforts of material culture and a spiritually deadening modernity. For such a downer, this is a really good little book. University of Wisconsin, Madison Ritt Deitz Djian, Philippe. Chéri-Chéri. Paris: Gallimard, 2014. ISBN 978-2-07-014318-4. Pp. 194. 18,50 a. Voilà plus de trente ans que Djian martèle la langue française, qu’il cherche à produire la phrase “qui tient debout”, à la manière de l’artisan qui travaille sa matière brute. Il le rappelle à chaque nouvelle parution, c’est-à-dire...