Quelques jours à vivre by François Leblanc (review)

Reviews 273 Leblanc, François. Quelques jours à vivre. Montréal: Triptyque, 2012. ISBN 978-289031 -737-6. Pp. 170. $22 Can. A middle-aged man dreams every night of being chased to, then pushed off, a high and dangerous precipice. As he falls to a certain death, his screaming voice becomes that of an ex-con who, in waking life, has threatened to kill him. Then the dreamer’s voice becomes his own father’s. This scene, which takes place in the middle of François Leblanc’s second novel, feels central to both character and story. Like many major characters in Leblanc’s début effort, Quinze secondes de célébrité (2009),Antoine Barcelo is a middle-aged parole officer in Montreal. His only coworker, Jimmy, spends most of his time drinking coffee and bragging about sexual adventures he has clearly invented. Antoine withstands the irritation, we understand, because he knows Jimmy is grieving a girlfriend who hanged herself. Meanwhile, Antoine’s wife Véronique has revealed her affair with a high school gym teacher, in the restaurant scene that opens the novel.“Sa liaison,” he ruminates, was what began “cette crise de milieu de vie qui plonge tant d’hommes dans une agitation désordonnée, persuadés qu’ils sont que le meilleur est derrière eux et que la deuxième partie de leur existence ressemblera à un vieux film suédois en noir et blanc” (15). If Quinze secondes was about a city, and the milieu peopled by tired parole officers and their wards, Quelques jours is about male midlife crisis. The novel is most interesting in its portrait of male characters interacting with one another. The policeman who visits the Barcelo residence to make a missingperson report, for instance, appears most important as a reminder of Antoine’s own feeling of vulnerability.A“modèle du genre,”the inspector“se comportait en bon mâle alpha, dardant sur son vis-à-vis un regard où l’on ne pouvait lire aucune bienveillance” (35).Antoine’s description of Steve—his wife’s new boyfriend, whom she brings along with her on a trip home to pick up some things—is similarly self-centered. Surprisingly middle-aged looking, Steve’s“calvitie prononcée”and“timide bedaine trahissant une dizaine de livres en trop” (57) are reassuring to the cuckolded narrator. Antoine’s interactions with his teenage son, Julien, are the least self-absorbed and thus the most touching. When Julien replies “Cool” to his father’s offer of a grilled cheese sandwich one afternoon, the narrator says,“Je préférais l’entendre répondre trop cool, expression par laquelle il manifestait un enthousiasme bien senti”(38). Later in the conversation, Antoine eventually forces Julien to admit he was beaten up: “Parfois [...] je pouvais ressembler à mon père. Je ne m’en apercevais jamais avec autant d’acuité que lorsque les yeux de Julien se remplissaient de larmes” (41). Leblanc’s first novel was stronger and more original. Yet, with its single narrator and central theme of male midlife, Leblanc’s sprightly style is still fresh, and readers of Quinze secondes may enjoy this sustained, focused foray into the anxieties of a single character. Compared with the many other contemporary Québécois novels one might describe this way, Quelques jours stands up relatively well. University of Wisconsin, Madison Ritt Deitz ...