From the start of the pandemic four years ago, it was predicted that the subject would greatly contaminate future literary releases, while wondering whether the readership would really be interested in books on COVID-19 after coming out of it. We made fun of the confinement stories a little, even if readers rushed to Plague by Camus for a few weeks, but we cannot say that there has been an avalanche of titles on this theme since.
Personally, I am very curious about what writers will do with this period, as they have always done with collective traumas which are rich literary material. Who will use it as a backdrop, as a plot, as a mirror of society?
Stories about the pandemic are emerging this spring in Quebec. For example, A garden in winter, Clara Grande’s touching first novel, which will arrive in bookstores on May 21. The author, after losing her job as a waitress when the restaurants closed, decides to go work in a CHSLD, where she is hired despite her inexperience, due to the staff shortage. “I wonder at what point patients have the strength to let their modesty go,” she writes, after washing residents’ private parts and learning the Bristol scale (you’ll google it). Between the existential questions of this young thirty-year-old slip the destinies of elderly people encountered in their greatest vulnerability, and one wonders if, by taking care of others, she does not learn to take care of herself. , in this strange period of his life. “For a little over a year, since the summer of Alexis, all the bodies I touched were at least three-quarters of a century old. I almost forget the feeling of young skin. Is mine still? Someone needs to confirm that for me. »
With simplicity and respect, Clara Grande tells us what happens daily behind the doors of a CHSLD, epidemic or not.
It doesn’t work out is a somewhat strange collective work from Héliotrope, where we find short stories by Catherine Mavrikakis, Simon Harel and Karine Gendron, as well as an essay by Dr Jean-Pierre Routy. But this book is very thought-provoking.
Once again, Mavrikakis surprises me with A virus called desire, which tells the story of Antonina, a Russian cosmonaut on a mission to the International Space Station, while on Earth, we are confined. “She is much freer than them in the depths of her little space station. It can, despite its smallness, contemplate the cosmos. Maybe the human species isn’t that important after all. » This is because Antonina, trained for her mission, very patriotic and pro-Putin, does not let herself be too affected by emotions and believes that the vaccine developed by Russia, named Sputnik V in homage to the first satellite launched in the space by the USSR in 1957, will restore all its glory to his country. But there is something even more interesting that Mavrikakis raises in this story: the fear of the contamination of mentalities. For Antonina, the virus is the West, and she is not the only one to think so on this planet.
This is perhaps what the pandemic has left behind in the increasingly divided discourses, this impression of a return to the spirit of the Cold War, where we are more and more convinced that the contagion is in the heads.
I laughed a lot while reading Curfew by Simon Harel, where a literature professor takes advantage of the privilege of having a dog to walk around during curfew, ruminating on his anger and meditating on Theater and the plague by Antonin Artaud. The least we can say is that he is in a very bad mood, and verbomotor like a character from Thomas Bernhard. “Artaud, he would have rebelled, I do not doubt it for a moment, against the principle of the socio-sanitary cartel, the curfew and six-dose vaccination, just as he would have rejected the idiots of the chemtrail, the denouncers of the vast project of cosmic annihilation for which the financiers of the planet are responsible, to stop demography, accumulate profits until they drop, you know well, all these delusions which mark the course of human time, the search for the scapegoat who is responsible for the evil, today public health and its torturers, yesterday (and still today), the Jew, the Arab, the foreigner in all its guises. » For him, without a doubt, the only way to get out of it, today and in the future, will be to accept that the catastrophe is not “an accident” and that it will be necessary to “stop to be meat in the eyes of the State.”
In Cracked by Karine Gendron, Annette, a 96-year-old lady who lives in an RPA, notes that if old age has gradually made her invisible in society, “the COVID-19 pandemic has definitely made her a recluse”. Despite everything, she loves Doctor Arruda and is a little judgmental of her children who think they have experienced everything. “They have not lived through a century of epidemics, war, economic crises and storms. They experience each contemporary event as an exception in history. However, the tragedies repeat themselves and Annette no longer always knows how to distinguish them because they are so similar. » It’s not a pandemic that’s going to stop her from celebrating her 96th birthday, and she’ll do a real bad blow to her absent family – to protect them – when she logs in for the virtual birthday meeting.
In his essay From one pandemic to another, where we are no longer in fiction, Doctor Jean-Pierre Routy makes links between the AIDS epidemic of which he was at the forefront in the past and that of COVID-19, particularly in the search for vaccines and treatments, and this, with the humility of a scientist who recognizes that he is once again faced with the unknown. He harshly criticizes the health measures which prevented people from seeing their loved ones at the worst of the pandemic, recalling that “even during the dark years of AIDS” (which for a time created real psychosis in my generation), “never no such ban on visits has been imposed for these patients on the verge of death.”
“All my life, I will keep alive the guilt, the revolt and the sadness of not having been able to allow, in the name of a principle of security, this farewell meeting between a woman and her husband. As a professional body, we have failed. We have forgotten the importance of the “ethics of distress” (Paul Ricoeur), which implores support in the face of the greatest fear, that of dying alone. »
If, like me, you still want to delve into this event that shook up our lives, you have food for thought here, but if you want to leave that behind you, I suggest you pass your turn.
A garden in winter
The Horse of August
163 pages
In bookstores May 21
It doesn’t work out
Heliotrope
172 pages