With The deserted yearsDavid Clerson adds a fifth book to one of the most unique works of Quebec literature, in which the marginalized continue to demonstrate more lucidity than anyone who obeys the march of our societies.
To write, David Clerson likes to lock himself in a cabin, or here, in this dark workshop of a dusty building in Mile End, the time to immerse himself for eight, nine or ten hours, away from the contingencies of life tell the truth.
“And this book is a little about these moments of interruption during which we really write and we really read. He talks about literature experienced entirely, something that I find quite beautiful, even if, in the book, it is not only positive,” he says of the Deserted yearsa novel in the baroque form of a long list of short manuscript descriptions.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, THE PRESS
David Clerson in interview
On the death of his brother, whom he has not seen for 30 years, a man inherits his dilapidated house, deep in a Mauritian row, where he discovers a hundred never-published manuscripts. And will undertake to read each of them.
A way for David Clerson to pay homage, implicitly, to an excessive literature, infatuated with its fixed ideas, the antipodes of that “which avoids these excesses, these risks of imperfection in which I often find more material than in which is too round”, explains the great reader, who admits to having developed a weariness, over the last few years, with the reign of “too slick” literature.
I like the idea of representing literature in its imperfection, of talking about illegible, incomprehensible, fragmentary texts, because I think that often, the most beautiful passages of a book, the most interesting, are its quirky passages, which protrude from the rest.
David Clerson
Disturbing coincidence
If David Clerson’s work has something autobiographical, it is only under several layers of mythologizing images, gloomy fables and visions flirting with the supernatural. But as this writer breaking with the world will reveal himself to his brother, beyond his death, through his hundred manuscripts, the author ofCrawling and of Sleep without a head believes to appear almost everywhere in his own books.
There is, in any case, a lot of his relationship with his three brothers in all the fraternal relationships contained in these stories full of humidity, dead animals and atrophied bodies. All the obsessions, all the distinctive features of David Clerson’s writing reappear in The deserted yearsincluding his love for rare words and this bewitching alternation between long, sinuous sentences and others, dry as twigs.
“This astonishing, almost worrying coincidence occurred,” confides, very hesitantly, the man who remains reluctant to weave links between his life and his work. “At the beginning of January, I was here in my office when my phone rang and I was told of the sudden death of one of my brothers. Two minutes later, my editor called me to tell me about a detail that still needed to be resolved for the back cover. » Back cover of a novel which tells the story of a man who learns of the death of his brother.
PHOTO MARTIN TREMBLAY, THE PRESS
David Clerson
The coincidence only becomes more disturbing, almost overwhelming, in light of the few evocations that Clerson offers on the subject of his brother who left too early, in his mid-fifties, a marginal “who did not correspond to our world, to this universe of competition, of performance, of self-presentation, which ended up crushing him.”
Like with My son only came back for seven days (2023), in which a man who reconnects with his mother after wandering for years on the American roads of poverty, The deserted years seems to suggest that there is in the choice of dropout of society more lucidity than among those who participate in the progress of the world and obey it.
“I have a lot of sympathy for those who are reduced to wandering or poverty, because the system in which we live is extremely violent,” observes the one who teaches literature at college.
I see it when I talk to my students: they feel this violence intimately and experience it very badly. So in the choice to take a different, and often more difficult, path, I see a certain beauty.
David Clerson
A speaking strangeness
His work has often been described as strange and David Clerson rejoices in this, to the extent that this strangeness allows, he specifies, “to return to today’s world in unexpected ways”.
Once a punk, always a punk, we could conclude about the man who had the impression of finding brothers (!) and sisters, as a teenager, in the basements of the music scene in Sherbrooke, his hometown , where his father worked as a church organist.
“Intuitively, when you are young, you realize that the world is in ruins,” he recalls, “and that perhaps you can rebuild something in a different way, by taking the negative and making it positive. » Exactly what his books accomplish.
The deserted years
Heliotrope
144 pages