“The world listens when I tell stories”, repeats Wilfrid, a low-profile thug who returns, after 30 years of absence, to the life of his sons. To the delight of the eldest, Louis, a worker who naively drinks his words. To the chagrin of the youngest and narrator of this short novel, Paul, literature teacher at CEGEP, disgusted by his father’s fatuity and lies. In the vein of his autobiographical story, my father’s fire (2014), Michael Delisle (nothing in the sky, 2021) takes a look without complacency or benevolence on an imperfect father too often absent. In doing so, he depicts with cruelty and a touch of bitterness a fraternal relationship about to burst, without the knowledge of one of the parties. Constructed in brief chapters stuffed with eloquent unsaid, carried by a precise pen dipped in acid, this solid account of a failed filiation and a transmission doomed to failure conveys an implacable reflection on incommunicability, masculinity, loneliness, old age.
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