The cigar at the edge of the lips | Akim Gagnon’s Thousand Bad Choices

“How do I start my book? asks music video director Akim Gagnon, in the prologue to his first novel. “I was told not to fall into the trap of writing what I am writing. The writer who tells himself. It didn’t even cross my mind. I’m certainly able to avoid this trap and write something a little more advanced. »

Dominic Late
The Press

But it turns out not. It turns out that Akim Gagnon hasn’t managed to circumvent the trap of writing what he is writing. It so happens that his first novel, The cigar at the edge of the lipstells the story of a writer who we observe becoming a writer, page after page, chapter after chapter.

What about “writing something a little more advanced”? Akim Gagnon definitely got there. “Often in life, I make very bad choices,” he laughs, about the somewhat hackneyed process – the act of writing told – on which his book is partly based. “I make very bad choices, then I come out of it well. »

He actually does well. Very well. Even if, like Louis-José Houde’s most recent show, Akim Gagnon’s book could have been called A thousand bad choicesso much does it look like an inventory of the calamitous decisions taken by its author, or by his alter ego, who never says no to yet another last drink too many and always sticks head first into a new romantic relationship.

Black hole

Chronicle of the miserable existence of a smoker of chair bars thirstier than a sink, The cigar at the edge of the lips is a bacchanalian novel, with a devastating humour, a shameless carnivalesque autofiction on which unfurl liters of Clamato beer, cheap shooters and orange wine from Pinard & Filles. But if the drink is sometimes a party there, it becomes above all a black hole, which little by little swallows this splendid unreliable, incapable of interacting with the other if he has not put on the mask of alcohol. .

Very often.

“It’s always provocation that guides all of my ideas,” regrets the narrator of Akim Gagnon’s first novel. It is because, as the coarse expression which gives it its title suggests, this book contains a quantity of scenes of defecation to make Rabelais blush.

The good book

The cigar at the edge of the lips is less a matter of provocation than a love story between writing and a guy who had always dreamed of the big screen, and not of literature. His first name alone already had something prophetic about it: it’s Eddie Murphy’s character in A prince in New York (Akeem) that his parents borrowed his.

“In elementary school, things clashed between the Jean-François and the Davids. But I learned to love my first name”, says the one who imagined himself becoming a director as soon as he took part in a film camp, at the age of 8, and to whom we owe today about thirty music videos (notably for his brother VioleTT Pi, for Klô Pelgag and for Philippe Brach).

He was 25 when he first came across a book he didn’t want to give up: I am a Japanese writer, by Dany Laferriere. “All my life, I had difficulty reading, I didn’t catch it,” he explains at 32 years old. We are seated in his apartment in Villeray, next to a library that suggests that he hastened, since this epiphany, to make up for lost time. “I’ve always had a complex about that. I was writing film scripts, but the people who talked about literature, I found them snobs. And there, I realized that I was just not opening the right books. »

Crazy, crazy nights

Beneath all the layers of self-mockery, scatology and histrionics that smear its chapters, The cigar at the edge of the lips therefore hides a great sensitive, who one day chose to take the means not to be carried away by the current. Although the properly epic brushes to which he submits give rise to passages of hilarious grotesqueness, two of the most moving scenes of the novel celebrate brotherly love as well as the love between a father and his son. Simply.

But since this is an Akim Gagnon book, these scenes unfold to the sound of two of the most wonderfully silly (and irresistible!) songs in rock history, nookieby Limp Bizkit, and Crazy, Crazy Nights, by KISS. Akim smiled, proud of his shot.

Self-portrait in grease pencil of a drifting man, The cigar at the edge of the lips bears witness to a rebirth that would never have been possible if its narrator (and its author) had not one day agreed to leave his pride at the doorstep of a shrink’s office. Without having completely given up on the pleasures of excess, Akim Gagnon has brought order to his chaos.

“But it’s a very long, very arduous, very personal job. It’s not a quick fix, you have to give yourself time. And taking time to talk about yourself, there’s something really powerful about that. I thought going to the shrink was getting played in the head, but I’ve never felt so strong since I did that. »

The cigar at the edge of the lips

Akim Gagnon

The Wick

344 pages