Dropped by the times, steered down the siding of his own existence, embalmed before his time, Pierre has the impression of having become what he calls an “urban mononcle”, obsessed with sorting recyclable materials. and the rise of the right in Quebec.
From the student strikes of 2012 to the confinement of 2021, it is this feeling of loss that Patrick Nicol explores in I was right next tohis twelfth novel.
Like Pierre, one of the narrators, Patrick Nicol was born in 1964 and lives in Sherbrooke, where he teaches at college. Any resemblance is not the result of chance and Patrick Nicol has often played the game of the seven differences. Just as he likes to sow new seeds in some of his old beds.
Since Small problems and medium adventures until Patrick Nicol’s blonde (Triptych, 1993 and 2005), by We won’t grow old (Lemeac, 2009) at The swimmer in the middle of the lake (Le Quartanier, 2015), the writer explores the wear and tear of time, decline, boredom, the terror of aging.
“Most of the world is unfolding beyond my reach,” thinks this teacher, losing his bearings, who has the confused feeling that his quest for transcendence is destined to lead him to a dead end, dragging at the bottom of his him this “little aggressiveness” that everyone seems to carry.
While his inner life is limited to looking at photos of birds on the Internet and following hyperlinks that others offer him, one thing is clear: the love of culture does not save anyone. Is it even communicable to the faceless “learners” who parade through its classes? The young people are not to blame: “They approached literature as one looks at a temple in ruins on an island lost in the fog. It is far. It’s messed up. »
He had to face the facts: “No one has discouraged so many people from literature as much as we have. And this acknowledgment of failure, personal and collective, he carries as a condemnation.
If the figure of Pierre is central, the focus occasionally shifts to other figures, all of whom gravitate in one way or another around him, making I was right next to a kind of composite novel. We meet his partner, Julie, a linguistics teacher at the university. A former student, Marianne, forced to interrupt her studies after becoming pregnant, who tastes sausages at Costco to pay the bills. A colleague of Julie, Amir, gay lecturer of Moroccan origin, specialist in popular Quebec language, victim of job insecurity.
Disillusioned, a spectator of the lives of others, Pierre sinks in the juice of his bitterness, while suddenly realizing that he knows little or nothing about his neighbours, his colleagues, his family members and his friends, just as he knows nothing of the strangers he meets at the grocery store.
Next to the plate? Beside himself and those around him? The imperfect of the title suggests a bygone situation, a reversal. He who wanted “something to happen to him” will be granted. It is a stay in the hospital – mixed with the pandemic experience – which will serve as a revelation to him: there is beauty, even in the ordinary of life, and perhaps it was a mistake of having “preferred the dead to the living”.
A novel as dark as it is luminous, I was right next to is the story of a man struggling with himself, on the edge of the abyss, prevented from taking a step forward by a burst of empathy: “Hating the world is an unbearable and vain posture. »