On the return of a father who has been absent too often and for too long, Paul becomes suspicious. His brother Louis opens his arms.
This discrepancy between the two brothers is the crucible in which Michael Delisle shapes his novel, which is essentially due to relationships punctuated by distance, almost silent complicity, misunderstood feelings and emotions most often retained. Paul, like his father, is alone, barely managing to bond with his students (he is a CEGEP teacher) and suffering from the rejection of another teacher whom he has momentarily taken on as a substitute brother or even father figure. .
Cabal, a short novel of a hundred pages, recounts without saying too much all that these men lack and thereby questions what it is to be a father, a friend, a brother. What it’s like to be a teacher, too, since Paul teaches literature at college, where he seeks to “light lanterns”, to “spread the light” in the minds of young people, some of whom seem to him “certified morons who were dangled with a career as an airline pilot”.
There is nothing pleasing about what Michael Delisle shows, whether he paints the portrait of a huckstering father or the loneliness of a colleague whose “erudition is no more valuable today than a musty-smelling cabinet of curiosities”. He poses in Cabal a disenchanted, even desperate look at the world. However, he does so with a certain tenderness and sometimes fierce humour, which give character to a story that is nevertheless rooted in mundane things, carried out with short chiseled chapters.
Cabal
Michael Delisle
boreal
136 pages