I hope that my colleague Chantal Guy will not file a grievance, since I am about to trample on her literary flowerbeds. But it’s the weekend, and the Sunday reader that I am wants to tell you that Alain Farah’s book is a magnificent escapade out of time, in these dirty pandemic times. It’s as good as they say it is.
It is called A thousand secrets, a thousand dangers, and that’s the story …
No, in fact, it’s not a story, I get over it …
It’s full of stories that intertwine, over several years, but around the wedding day of the author-narrator, who staged himself, who placed himself at the center of real-false events with his cousin, his girlfriend, his girlfriend’s best friend, her parents… What is true, what is wrong? We don’t know.
Narrator: “At what point do this day that I am recounting, this novel that I am writing begin to end? When Wali Wali treats me and my father as multiculturalist soft balls? When Edouard parks in front of my house very late and towing? When he forgets the rings in the sacristy? When I explode and insult him at the foot of the statue of Brother André? When, at the cocktail, do I start drinking? When my mother at the microphone recognizes, for the first time in her life, and in public, some of her faults?
” No.
“The beginning of the end, it comes when he come. ”
He, it’s Bad, Baddredine, a high school friend that the groom has not seen since adolescence, his pet peeve, his nemesis, that the young Farah even tried to kill, long ago …
In Alain Farah’s novel, there is friendship which is as strong as family, as strong as love; there is the family which holds us and which traumatizes us, there is love, love-all-short which is sometimes the wind in our sails; there is the often stifling love of parents (“my mother has always been there […] Too much there, perhaps ”), there are the caricatures that one is of oneself in high school when one is looking for oneself …
And there is the pain of not knowing how to find the words to say things …
I quote the narrator: “The truth is that we do not choose the images that haunt us and that make us. ”
And there is also, in A thousand secrets, a thousand dangers, immigration. Farah is the son of an Egyptian, the son of a Lebanese woman. Son of immigrants then. And in the novel, this is immigration, it defines Farah and her family, it is there in filigree and in the foreground, but never in the tone of the tutorial. Tutorial? Know, when we talk about immigration in the tone of an awareness workshop? None of that here: Farah’s characters are Quebeckers who devote themselves to living universal things, who… Who live, ordeal, who are good and stupid in the same minute. It’s a Quebec novel that touches the universal, with people from elsewhere who crown like Tremblay. And an uncle born in Egypt who loves the Hérouxville code of life …
It’s a novel about life, about death. Touching, never despairing. There is the echo of Jean-Paul Dubois in Farah’s self-mockery, in his way of exploring his faults, his faults, his faults. I laughed. And forgive the cliché: I laughed and I cried.
It’s a novel about disease, too: Farah suffers from Crohn’s disease, like her father. Like my mother, like I told in Press before Christmas1. Farah read this column and he recognized himself in the description of my late mother’s life, half of her life folded in two. And I recognized myself, dear Alain, when you described the pharmacopoeia which allowed you, at one time, to hold out. It had been a long time since I had read the word Purinethol, since M’man died, in fact …
A friend who is about to die, a clumsy cousin still in a mess, parents who have gone to war with each other and who have left scars on her: Farah interweaves these stories, these themes, these characters with the skill of a craftsman. And he never watches himself write, it goes without saying, the dialogues are real, it looks like you are listening to people talking at the next table, at the restaurant (when we could go to the restaurant) …
Towards the end of A thousand secrets, a thousand dangers, Shafik, the taciturn father, the father who never speaks of the shame linked to his suffering, sits down to table, confides his secrets to his son in a scene that has nothing to do with it, nor high-sounding, nor grandiloquent , but which is in the category of the nicest things I have read on fatherhood.
If you’re a dad, if you’ve got a dad, you’re going to read that part with Kleenex. I’ll quote you one sentence, just one: “Do better than me, my son. ”
I leave you with an exchange between Farah and another character, I will not say who, I do not want to sell punch, I leave you the pleasure of reading the novel:
“I noticed something tonight, Alain. You are surrounded by people who love you.
– Yes, I’m lucky. I like them too.
– It’s precious, you know?
– I know, even though I don’t always take good care of them.
– It’s because you haven’t learned to take care of yourself yet. Think about it, Farah. ”
Being well surrounded, I think about it …
In the end, it’s just that.
And this is what I wish you for 2022, dear readers: to be well surrounded.