In an interview with the French magazine Telerama in 2007, the great American novelist Philip Roth expressed concern about the future of reading. “Faced with the screen and its hypnotic power, reading novels is now a dying art. There is no shortage of readers, he explained, but “serious, focused, intelligent reading is an activity that keeps on receding.”
Former deputy chief of staff of Pauline Marois, Dominique Lebel is part of the last square of resistants. In 2016, he published his first book, In the depths of power (Boréal), political newspaper of his experience with the Prime Minister. He revealed himself there, already, as a great reader, always ready to take refuge in the pages of Stendhal, Rushdie, Carrère and Ormesson during the rare breaks left to him by his political activity.
In 2019, in Between two worlds (Boréal), following his journal, literature occupied more and more space. A supporter of an independent and social-democratic French Quebec, Lebel, a technology entrepreneur who does business on an international scale, portrayed himself first and foremost as an absolute lover of literature. “To read, he wrote, is to live more” because “we would not know how to read ourselves without literature”.
In And me, I always read (Robert Laffont, 2022, 256 pages), Lebel finally fully assumes his only true passion. Composed of 30 “love portraits” of giants of international literature of the last three centuries — from Alexandre Dumas to Michel Tremblay, including James Baldwin, Marguerite Duras, Toni Morrison and many others — this lively and heartfelt book is a celebration of reading conceived as the compass par excellence in the art of living.
In a passionate introduction, Lebel delivers a eulogy of literature which changes the lives of those who decide to frequent it, which is the key to freedom, because it transports us, at all speeds, “through the times, places, seasons”, and which “allows us to see what we cannot see with our eyes”.
Great works, insists Lebel, have “this marvelous fact that by pretending to bring us closer to them, they actually bring us closer to ourselves”. Advocating for a literature without constraints, foreign to well-meaning and “polices of all kinds that swarm around us”, this introduction forcefully reiterates that “literature is one of the best kept secrets” of free spirits of all the time.
First appeared in News, the “love portraits” that Lebel draws of his favorite authors shine with their freshness and elegance. The columnist reads without system, for the pleasure, but with the concern to come out invigorated by the experience. “It’s because you don’t read a novel to learn something that you learn so much from it,” he notes.
Hemingway, whom he venerates, wrote in Farewell to arms (1929) that we have to get used to the fact that “at the most important crossroads in our lives there are no signs”. Lebel makes this uneasy wisdom the guideline of his amorous readings, particularly inspired when they relate to Joan Didion, FS Fitzgerald, Michel Tremblay and the Malraux-de Gaulle tandem. There is no definitive answer to the question of how to live, but readers know that, in this quest, the great writers are their friends, even, writes an admiring Lebel, their “protectors”. God knows we need it.
Michel Lord is another of those great readers who swear by quality literature. Born into a working-class family in Cap-de-la-Madeleine in 1949, Lord, in a previous book, said he had been saved from insignificance by literature and classical music. Having become, against all odds, a doctor of Quebec literature and a professor at the University of Toronto, for 40 years he wrote the column on the short story in Quebec letters.
In 25 years of Quebec news by its best newsmen and newswomen, 1996-2020 (La Grenouillère, 2022, 344 pages), Lord devotes himself to “consecration criticism” in order to illustrate the great richness of this often neglected genre, but which he and I cherish. The critic knows the news from here like the back of his hand and comments on it with enthusiasm and finesse.
His presentation of the work of Gilles Archambault, master of “the aestheticized lightness of despair”, is particularly remarkable. The 71 short stories and 160 collections selected, including those of Suzanne Myre, “one of the revelations of the period”, all received careful and generous treatment. In our short story, notes Lord, unhappiness is a dominant theme. Happiness is for the reader.