“I saw the reflection of my grandchildren in the pond, their long, dark shapes, which might have been those of their uncle and grandfather, and in their midst the shining reflection of the sun. I saw him looking at me, a strange star, a star that revealed nothing…”
David Clerson’s novels are like this sun, bearers of a fundamental strangeness, on the one hand of inaccessibility that, as a reader — or as a human faced with the mysteries of nature — one must accept, penetrate without resistance, without violence , allow yourself to feel without trying to explain everything.
We find this part of strangeness everywhere – both in form and in substance – in his latest novel, My son only came back seven days, which recounts the upset daily life of a mother when she receives a visit from a son who has been missing for more than ten years. “This book was born from a desire for depersonalization, for strangeness in relation to myself, says the author, met by The dutyin the offices of Héliotrope editions, in Montreal. I wanted to give voice to someone who is neither my age nor my gender, to explore her motherhood with a narrative progression anchored in everyday life, the repetition of gestures, of days. »
Even if it can be difficult and painful, we can see the homelessness of the son, his inability to live normally, as a way to escape this logic of private property, the social constraints that impose success, wealth and life. ‘ambition.
Day after day, mother and son walk to a bog where they used to go when the son was a child. Along the way, the latter continues the story of his life, begun in a series of letters that he has transmitted to her over the years. He recounts his wandering, labyrinthine and lonely, carried by a hallucinated vision of reality located somewhere on the border of dream and reality, where mushrooms eat away at the stomach, the head, parasitize the bronchi and the lips. The more they progress, the more their feet sink into the sphagnum, moss, peat, their ears assailed by the buzzing of flies and the deafening song of tree frogs. Gradually, they become familiar with a unique ecosystem that matches the threads of their emotions, of their impossibility to inhabit the world as it is.
Back to humility
This form of organic fusion with nature is at the heart of David Clerson’s works, dug out of a desire to break, to question the boundary that humans have erected between themselves and nature. Her first novel, Brothers (2013), explored sisterhood through the development of a canine identity, while his second, Crawling (2016), united the universe of insects to that of humans.
“There is a political will behind all this. We live in a world where the dominant thought is that of humans who appropriate nature. This pride at the base of capitalism is the cause of the disaster in which the world is plunged today. By blurring the border, I want to put the human in a posture of humility, to show that he is not separated from nature, but that he is part of it. »
In My son only came back seven days, the bog’s cycle of life, death, rebirth and decay fits perfectly with the book’s cyclical, repetitive dynamic. First affecting the son, this almost postapocalyptic tingling gradually wins over the mother, who gradually adheres to her child’s need for wandering and disappearance.
“Around the chalet in which she found refuge, there are more and more people who inhabit the territory, buildings that are being built, ostentatious wealth that manifests itself. It is very present, in the North American identity, Quebec in particular, this need to express its social success by the display of increasingly large possessions and by a very violent occupation of the territory. The narrator of the novel can no longer walk in the forest or navigate the lake as she used to. She feels her universe closing in on herself and wants to flee like her son. »
quest for freedom
Once again, the novelist gives voice to free spirits, transforming their weaknesses into strengths to renounce a system or a reality that oppresses them. “Even if it can be difficult and painful, we can see the homelessness of the son, his inability to live normally, as a way of escaping this logic of private property, the social constraints that impose success, wealth and ambition. The mother, for her part, tries to reproduce this wandering as much as she can in her forest, finding there a space of freedom. »
This form of situationist drift allows David Clerson to base his writing on the subjective impressions and effects of places, and to dwell on feelings — sweat, heat, heartbeats, smells and textures — rather than on thoughts and feelings. rational explanations. His dreamlike, surreal and dystopian universe defies definition, is felt more than understood. The oppressive character of the forest, the heat of the sun, the taste of the rain on the lips and the damp moss under the feet, the malaise that sets in, the desire to flee… Everything calls for experience, memories and sensory memory.
In a constantly accelerating world, where landscapes suddenly disappear and metamorphose, there is something reassuring in letting oneself be caught up in this proposal anchored in a repetitive and immutable present, echoing the rare soils and ecosystems impermeable to the ambition of men.