Zagreb par François Leblanc (review)

Reviews 269 fille de joie dont il tombe amoureux. Rejetant sa proposition de mariage, elle l’éconduit froidement et brise ce cœur trop candide. Il retombe amoureux d’Irène, une belle passante qui lui demande de choisir entre l’amour et la boxe. Enchaînant les victoires, il atteint le sommet de la gloire dans un combat contre le champion d’Afrique du Nord à Alger: “C’est une ville mythique [...]. Aucun étranger de passage ne la quitte sans emporter quelque chose dans sa valise. Quand on passe par Alger, on traverse le miroir. On arrive avec une âme et on s’en va avec une autre” (340). L’hommage à Camus au temps du Premier homme adolescent, est palpable. Toutefois, Turambo n’échappera pas à son destin qui le condamnera au bagne.Rappelant Céline et Steinbeck par moment, Khadra bouscule la langue française. Très bien écrit, riche en personnifications et en néologismes, son texte pullule de maximes succulentes. De par son style superbe et la beauté de ses deux derniers romans, Khadra est en train de s’imposer comme l’un des plus grands écrivains de langue française. University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point Alek Baylee Toumi Leblanc, François. Zagreb. Montréal: Triptyque, 2013. ISBN 978-2-89031-859-5. Pp. 170. $20 Can. Leblanc completes his“trilogie carcérale”in this short novel that pits two grieving men against each other in a tense urban setting. Just out of jail after serving time for a crime he always claimed he did not commit, Roy Berthiaume plots his revenge against the probation officer whose testimony was the strongest evidence of his guilt. That agent, Bernard Telmosse, has still not recovered from the death of his teenage daughter in a traffic accident three years earlier. He wanders about in a fog of grief, unaware of the danger stalking him. The tale unfolds in a milieu readers of Leblanc’s first two novels are familiar with: mostly the apartments, probation offices, and streets of contemporary Montreal. In Zagreb,we see less of the bureaucracy of the correctional system—before and after—than the private anxieties of two particular men, fighting off their own peculiar demons. Berthiaume inhabits the kind of stressed-out, handto -mouth daily life characters like Leblanc’s parole officers are all familiar with. He studies Telmosse’s daily life, stalking him and imagining all the ways he might hurt him, but Berthiaume must always contend with the crowded, impoverished world he has returned to: “Quand il se réveille le matin avec les sous-vêtements de sa mère accrochés à toutes les poignées de porte, Roy pense qu’il n’est sorti de prison que pour entrer à l’asile”(25). He is also distracted from his revenge fantasies, by righteous and even tender thoughts about the step-daughter he was sent to jail for abusing. Telmosse had given testimony that led to Berthiaume’s conviction, but did he know what had really happened? “Savait-il que Keyla ne sautait pas de repas quand Roy veillait sur elle, qu’elle arrivait à l’heure à l’école, qu’il n’y avait pas de trous dans ses souliers?” (79). At the beginning, this thuggish stalker is frightening. By the middle of the novel, one starts to sympathize with him a little, or at least to wonder. Telmosse seems to spend his days replaying his daughter Audrey’s accidental death (she is hit by a car crossing a major street with her bicycle). His relationship with his wife Suzanne has unraveled, and his interactions with Audrey’s surviving sister, Ophélie, also suffer from his unending grief. Leblanc has even woven excerpts from Audrey’s diary into the text, lending a surprising elegance to the portrayal of the grieving father’s pain and confusion . Revealing how the seemingly inevitable encounter between Berthiaume and Telmosse plays out would be a disservice, since that encounter is both central to the experience of the novel as a whole and also somewhat stunning. Leblanc’s economy of language is striking in this third novel. His first two, Quinze secondes de célébrité (2009) and Quelques jours à vivre (2012...