Doesn’t François Blais always write the same book? The analysis, which has long held both praise and gentle reproach, is less and less verified, as the Mauritian cantor leaves his proverbial comfort zone, especially in The rivers followed by The mountains. Two ghost stories (2017), and in A book about Mélanie Cabay, undoubtedly his most personal work. The only thing that interests everyone, its twelfth title for adults, nevertheless marks its first frank foray into the heart of what is called genre literature, namely science fiction.
In the not-so-distant future, Quebec is now an independent state thanks to Théodore Désilets, a native of Louiseville who became immensely popular after creating two TV series, including one in India. It was there that he befriended Viswanathan Gavaskar, the omnipotent tycoon of Kampa, a company more powerful than all the GAFAMs put together. The novel begins when an agent of the Parakarr, a monitoring body entrusted with the mission of ensuring that a parmika, a kind of servant endowed with a breathtaking artificial intelligence, has not reached the state of consciousness, which would allow him to be considered as a whole person.
” Like most science fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details », Wrote Kurt Vonnegut in The little champions lunch, a sentence that François Blais highlights in this new book as a warning. The only thing that interests everybody is a science fiction novel that fascinates not thanks to the refined architecture of the world it elaborates, but thanks to the questions that the thin gap between the universe it describes and the real allows it to highlight.
The author ofIphigenia in Upper Town and of Document 1 thus uses the artifices of a soft dystopia in order to dig into what should henceforth be called his obsessions: the pangs of a rigid bureaucracy, the ease with which our societies have access to young women and the general indifference aroused by literature . All the ingredients for a good François Blais are there: insider jokes on marginal writers (here Patrick Brisebois) or on towns without history in his Mauricie, long sociohistoric asides (as if Wikipedia had interfered with the text. ), an ironic-distressed look at the surrounding idiocy and an unstoppable sense of the phrase (“The recurring joke at that time was that the future of artificial intelligence lay in the development of artificial stupidity.”)
But if The only thing that interests everybody is an authentic novel by François Blais, it is above all because it allows us to see better than ever to what extent, under his air of daily columnist, François Blais is one of the most philosophical of our writers. This moralless tale, turning in all directions the sprawling subjects of intelligence and the very possibility of happiness, encapsulates a flagship idea of his work, namely that the brief moments of beauty that punctuate existence – listen to the Beach Boys in her car, for example – justify on their own to tolerate all that is tragic, or more simply, that the strength of the human bond is precisely what makes it possible to endure the violence of the world.
Doesn’t François Blais always write the same book? Let us say now that he masters the art of renewing himself, while remaining himself.