A lecturer at a Montreal university, a historian specializing in paleography — the study of ancient handwritten writing — the protagonist of The irreparablePierre Samson’s ninth novel since The Messiah of Belém (Les Herbes rouges, 1996), feels like a dinosaur.
On the cusp of his sixties, a “seasoned homosexual”, Eugène Rolland was never able to regain his taste for love after the tragic death of his first partner, taken by AIDS in the late 1980s.
Having become, in spite of himself, a bag“one of those aging homosexuals, torn between a tenacious libido and a renunciation worthy of an unhappy Benedictine”, this “dusty artifact” ekes a living in comfort and bitterness, reaping the rotten fruits of his lack of ambition.
And when the new department director chooses to dismiss him in order to, she explains, “adapt our offer to the needs of our customers”, preferring the young and mysterious Irina Delgado-Smith who appeared out of nowhere, he goes crazy.
Believing himself to be the victim of an injustice, sidelined in favor of younger and more militant minorities, even suspecting a case of intellectual fraud, the protagonist of The irreparable will dive head first into an obsessive investigation with unexpected consequences.
Erudition but not too muchhumor, digressions, style: five years later The mammoth (Heliotrope, 2019), we reconnect with pleasure in The irreparable with the manner of the novelist.
“I was starting to get really irritated by the speeches that were flying around everywhere. Particularly that of certain white men in positions of authority who, as soon as they are upset, launch anathemas and accusations: woke, cancel culturevengeful feminists and all that,” Pierre Samson says in an interview to explain the birth of his new novel.
An observation that is also valid on the “other side”, adds the novelist, that of the defenders of the “new values”. “There, if we deviate from dogma, we are misogynists, phallocrats, reactionaries or even Nazis. What is there in between? I found myself in between. It seemed to me that certain people of an older generation, of which I am a part, deserved to be heard and could take a critical look at the current situation without being treated as fascists.”
The swan song
The novel is thus an opportunity for commentary on the state of the world, highlighted by Pierre Samson’s sharp humor. Eugène is annoyed by many things. The new codes of love, which give him the impression of being left behind by his time. The clientelism of universities. The moral preaching that the era serves us. The “gender obsession.”
Let us not be fooled by these complaints and this swan song of a sixty-year-old white male. That would be to forget that in Pierre Samson the universe remains a complex place where initial appearances rarely take an open boulevard towards an overly expected outcome. The novelist knows how to lay out the pitfalls.
“He is a character who doubts himself, aware of his potential mediocrity. Giving one’s opinion today is a rather complicated position, especially when it diverges from the doxa. It is a position in which many people find themselves, starting with me, recognizes Pierre Samson. It is quite possible that I am wrong. But can we think? The discussion is volatile today, people are very angry.”
And like Benjamin Paradis, the hero professor of anthropology of The House of Rains (Les Herbes rouges, 2013), Eugène Rolland also comes from a background where intellectual curiosity was not encouraged. “Son of a modest pen-pusher and an illiterate woman grafted to his furnace”, he made his way.
Pierre Samson, born in Montreal in 1958, grew up in Hochelaga and also comes from far away, in a way. Even though he didn’t really go to university, some might label him as a “class defector” in the fashion popularized by Didier Eribon and Édouard Louis.
“Born in an alley behind the central station, my mother came from extreme poverty,” the writer recalls. “She took her first bath when she was 15. She became an extremely clean woman, but she was the product of her class. For her, education was not important. It was just a matter of learning to read and write.”
“She even said to me one day, insulted after learning that I had just won a scholarship: ‘Why don’t you go wash dishes like everyone else?'” The writer says that this mother with a “crazy imagination” had even prepared him to be a gigolo, just like the character of Jérôme in the novel. “I come from a working class. I slipped a little upwards or to the side, I imagine, towards another class,” says Pierre Samson. A world that he would never have known if he had followed his mother’s encouragement.
The obsession with labels
And, on the subject of labels, the writer recalls that publicly stating that one was homosexual in the early 1980s was a sort of rallying cry. In our era obsessed with individual freedom, “the sacred cow of exploiters,” believes Pierre Samson, all the new identity boxes seem to him to be more of an effort at distinction. A way of “defining a human as a product” that shocks him and which also contributed to nourishing the reflection on living together that is found in the novel.
The irreparable of the title is the protagonist’s heartache, it is a gesture or a word too many with disproportionate repercussions. But it is also, carried as a question, an observation on our society which seems to be atomizing. Like the character of Eugène, contaminated in spite of himself by “hostility towards the other” fed by algorithms and the echo chamber of social media, but who will be somehow saved by friendship and the rediscovery of love – let’s not say more.
But the irreparable is also the passing of time, the approaching expiration date, the dread of aging that runs through the novel. Especially for a gay man, for whom the sixties are a particularly traumatic boundary, the writer emphasizes.
Pierre Samson devotes himself, without urgency, but full-time to literature, even if his friends, he says somewhat jokingly, often believe that he doesn’t work. Not really. “But I work all the time. I’m always reading or thinking. I have a lot of respect for people who are able to do it part-time, but I couldn’t write like that. I have to be able to immerse myself all the time in the universe of the novel I’m writing.” The information that reaches him, the conversations he has, the films he sees: for the duration of a novel, the writer perceives the world through a particular filter. In the case of The irreparablethe process lasted four years.
“It’s a filter that undoes everything, that can give false appearances, make us awkward, cynical, ironic or very serious. For me, it’s a way of life, to write a novel.”