After two critically acclaimed novels, Fugitive Pieces (1996) and The Winter Vault (2009), Toronto-born writer Anne Michaels signs with Hugs a third story with poetic accents, which confirms his place among the most important Canadian voices today.
Hugs opens with a fragment that contains in utero the whole project of the novel: “The shadow of a bird crossed the hill; he didn’t see the bird. » In Michaels, the gaze does not rest on the bird, but on its shadow. Like Proustian characters, the subjects emerge in lack, take on depth in their absence, always seem on the threshold of disappearance.
From France to Estonia, via Finland and England, the novel first follows the couple formed by Helena and John, before turning to the three generations who succeed them. Events repeat themselves from 1910 to 2025 with tiny variations, such as the genesis of a love story, the experience of grief, the mystification of invisible phenomena. If the novel takes the First World War as its starting point, this detail appears secondary – one would have said, moreover, that the narrative plot was secondary, in Hugs. In fact, we emerge from this reading as we would emerge from a hallucination. From a fog.
The war is approached through furtive, tirelessly intimate scenes, freeze frames suspended in the moment of desire, because “ [l]he desire permeates everything; nothing human can be expunged from it. » One of the strongest intuitions of this novel consists of putting desire in tension with mourning, something that Michaels already examined in his previous collection of poetry: “the moment when desire / by force becomes / mourning / the precise distance / between these two words”. (Everything we saw)
Her writing, halfway between the white language of Marguerite Duras and the mystical simplicity of Jacques Brault, works from the brief form, conducive to metaphysical meditation. Sewn into a montage that demonstrates the work of goldsmithing, the fragments sometimes take on an aphoristic value: “Animism tells us that the stone wants to fall, that the air wants to move. We are porous, fluid, fleeting, panting; everything living responds to the chemistry of light. There are so many kinds of weather. In a long exposure, the fixed stars leave traces of their wake. »
Aren’t the greatest writers those who manage to produce real thought in their works? Michaels takes up this challenge with flying colors in this interrogative novel which offers no answers. The author never ceases to note her own failure, insisting on the incapacity of language to account for reality: “Each word hesitating in its insufficiency, a kind of lie. He needed words as inflexible as numbers, the zero in an equation. » Let us salute, finally, the translation of Dominique Fortier, which truly allows us to “show” and “feel” all the tenderness that emerges from this universe.
Pure delight.