“It is a story without a real ending or a fictional beginning that could end in a dead end,” it seems.
In the same way, the third novel by André Hamel, a “young” writer born in 1944, could be – but also not be – the last part of a trilogy project which remains vague in the eyes of the author himself, after To die of oblivion And Old Hubert’s Dismay (Leméac, 2017 and 2019). In Unlived lives, A novel of memory, all in spirals, which is embodied in a style that is both old-fashioned and tense, André Hamel summons a sort of alter ego, “an old writer on the comeback” brushed against dementia, whose gaze is increasingly turned inward. For fear, he explains to us, of “running aground on the foaming outcrops of the world’s disorders and breaking there”.
He himself gives us a bit of a summary of the adventure at the heart of this new book: the story of an old writer with a failing memory “who calls on an old friend of his own invention in order to patch together parts of his life that he wants to make into a novel.”
The rest is in keeping. Before the world closes in on him completely, object and subject of the “inevitable defeat”, the man wants to tell us about his life. Or rather his lives: the one he has lived, the one he imagines and then the others, all the others, the “unlived lives”. The unlived lives? They are the ones he did not choose, “the ones he renounced without even having weighed up the pros and cons”.
To do this, the fleeing narrator projects himself in the company of his multiple avatars, with whom he dialogues, on the paths of possibilities. We see him sometimes as a social sciences student at the university practicing active listening in a barbershop in Rosemont, sometimes as a child on a bicycle on a Mauritian dirt road or as a successful author “whom no one talks about and whom everyone reads”.
The reader, for his part, is asked to buckle up and hold on tight. Because he is going to accompany as closely as possible this “man lost in his forgetfulness”, a true conscience in disarray that André Hamel mercilessly tosses between reality, forgetfulness, fantasies and inventions in search, above all, of all those he was not.
Visited by fragments of his childhood in Sainte-Mère-la-Grande (read Grand-Mère, in Mauricie), the “old man-novel” gains density through imaginary encounters – or doubly imaginary ones -, reminiscences, astral travel in “mythomaniac drifts”. A reading experience that demands a certain abandon. And a quantity of characters who pass by and to whom the reader has difficulty becoming attached.
The sleight of hand here, “an intrepid writing that needs space to unfold”, may recall a little James Joyce or VLB, much less narrative and more dizzying.
With this “hallucinatory pilgrimage”, where the finish line is perhaps the same as the departure line, crossed by invented memories as by meditations on the story and narration, André Hamel also questions the capacity of literature – as well as his own limits as an author – to organize the chaos of life, memories and possibilities.