Asbestos, by Sébastien Dulude | The Boys of Summer, the Back-to-School Book

Even before its publication, Asbestosthe first novel by Sébastien Dulude, has already been selected for two major French prizes. An interview with the man who says he wanted to seize the “literary opportunity” presented by his youth in Thetford Mines.

“I lived there for a decade, but I go back there every week in my dreams,” confides Sébastien Dulude, speaking of the Mitchell district of Thetford Mines, a town of asbestos and its youth.

Asbestos : it is also the title of the poet’s first novel, written around a “territory that has inhabited me for a long time”, he says, recalling the lunar landscape, surrounded by mining residues, of his primary and secondary school years.

Even before its release, Asbestos benefited from exceptional attention in France where it was among the 11 books selected for the Literary Prize The World (which will be awarded on September 2), in addition to being a finalist for the Première Plume prize (won last year by another Quebecer, Éric Chacour). Éditions J’ai lu have already acquired the rights to its paperback reissue.

This is partly explained by the efforts made in Europe by his publishing house, La Peuplade, but also by the proverbial maturity of this first novel, which does not at all mark the first step in literature of the 47-year-old author, insofar as he has already published three collections and is a flamboyant veteran of the poetry performance circuit.

Read our report on Quebec’s literary offensive in France

Inspired in part by the life of Dulude, Asbestos — It is obvious from the first pages – is first and foremost a work of fiction or, at least, a novel less interested in the factual nature of the biographical than in the accuracy of the sensations flowing through the body of Steve Dubois, 9 years old, as he falls madly, dizzyingly, into friendship with little Poulin.

“As soon as the biographical aspect lurks around your project, we often want to take a realistic, almost documentary approach,” observes the man who is also literary director at La Mèche publishing house, “but sometimes there is a literary opportunity to seize.”

Something spooky

Sébastien Dulude seizes this opportunity with fiery mastery thanks to a luxuriant, sometimes precious language, cut with the care of a diamond cutter. A language that certainly translates the languid daily life of his character, but perhaps more what is budding in his mind and his heart.

“Something phantasmagorical,” the author sums up, which this “extreme fictionalization” allows him to embrace. “Steve is a condensation of my darkness,” adds the one who shares with his alter ego a love for metal, a music that will have “encompassed the anger that I felt and that I did not know what to direct against,” he says.

In 1986, Steve and little Poulin spend their long days in the dilated time of summer reading Tintin in their cabin, cataloguing in a scrapbook articles reporting disasters and, more generally, to savor the sunny freedom of their unsupervised existence, which will quietly blur the discovery of sexuality and a dull anger at a world that always ends up taking back from us what it gives us.

Steve and his best They are at the age where friendship can still flourish without false modesty, in a sacred fusion, blessed by warmth and sweet apple juice.

“There is always a moment when the natural tenderness that can exist between two boys is broken by social norms, where you no longer see boys holding each other by the shoulders in the same way,” Dulude emphasizes. “While they are in a sensual well-being of being in the company of the other. Steve is with his idol who protects him from everything.”

Pain and euphoria

Thetford Mines is one of the three asbestos towns in Quebec and, therefore, a town of physical, often alienating work. A town subject to the power of mining companies and to the market value of a material that is now reviled.

Sébastien Dulude’s late father embodied the implacable logic of an industry that abandons the holes and people it has exploited whenever it pleases: it was in order to close the books of a mine that he moved his family from Laval to Thetford Mines, which, as you can easily guess, did not facilitate the social integration of his son.

Steve’s father drives a big truck and pours out his anxieties on his son in the evenings. “I was surprised that it was one of the first things booksellers in France told me about,” Dulude says of the presentations he gave in Paris in the spring. “Then I remembered that I was in the country of Germinal ! The sociological background, which affects the characters, they know that. There is a global violence that inhabits this type of city, where no one really belongs to themselves.

Without embellishing anything, quite the contrary, Sébastien Dulude has written a novel that is certainly not a celebration of Thetford Mines, but which manages to place side by side all the pain and euphoria of a lonely youth, at the heart of an environment largely obliterated by Quebec literature. The canonical work with Thetford Mines as its setting, Dust on the city by André Langevin, dated 1953.

“It may not be humble to say it like that, but I wanted to write THE book on Thetford Mines in those years.”

In bookstores

Asbestos

Sebastien Dulude

The People

224 pages