Granby past simple | Akim Gagnon tells the man of his life

“With my father, you never know when the comedy show ends and when the Greek tragedy begins,” writes Akim Gagnon in Granby in the past simplea chronicle of his difficult childhood in a mobile home as full of holes as the good intentions of his fascinating father.

You would offer him the coziest four-poster bed that Akim Gagnon’s father would still prefer to sleep on the couch. It is that when his own father dies, the then 17-year-old young man is welcomed by his grandfather in his small apartment. The couch will become his refuge.

“Pop doesn’t seem to make the connection between the couch he snuggled up on the day he was orphaned and all the following ones he threw himself headfirst on,” his son wrote in Granby in the past simpleprequel to his first novel, The cigar at the edge of the lips. “For me, it’s all very clear. It reminds me, again, that with Pop, the answers are in the subtext. »

A loving father, constantly having the words “I love you” in his mouth, Papa Gagnon in no way corresponds to the archetype of this monosyllabic man who fills Quebec fiction with his proverbially deafening silence. But it is not enough to say “I love you” to transmit only love.

One day when the floor of his mobile home rises because of a split pipe, thus blocking a door, he decides, rather than remedying the situation, to simply chimerage the door in question. Bypass his problems, and his emotions, to better pour them on his offspring? The gentleman knew about it.

“The house was like my father’s head, struggling with a growing depression,” wrote Akim Gagnon who, in an interview in a billiard room, where he was playing that afternoon with his brother Karl, remembered these many “funny stories which, with hindsight, have become sad”.

Akim caresses the worn fabric of the sofa we are sitting on. “I can’t see a couch without thinking of my father. I see my father on every couch in the world. He adds with that mixture of sweet arrogance and dizzying lucidity that permeates his young work: “But I excuse my father, because it gave Christie a good book, and because he was not aware of the weight that came with his love. »

Learn to love yourself

Wait for dad to switch to the left before devoting a novel to him, as so many writers before him have preferred to do? “Me, I wanted him to read me, slice Akim. Especially since my goal was not to be hard on my father, but to be frank. »

The son also learned to love himself, a lot thanks to writing. Few books are read with so much joy, even in their darkest moments, as Granby in the past simplenot only because Akim Gagnon has an incredible sense of the image that is both unusual and warmly familiar, but also, and above all, because a cousin pleasure of jubilation makes each of its chapters pulse.

The past simple that he uses almost throughout – an idea that occurred to him while reading a translation of Bukowski – contributes a lot to this comic tension between the nobility of a verb tense that takes itself for another and the anxiety prosaicism of an environment where only acting classes allowed him to believe that another life existed, elsewhere.

“When writing entered my life,” recalls the man who experienced the revelation of literature rather late, in his mid-twenties, “it was the first time that I took care of myself, that I didn’t ‘t numb, that I listened to myself to know what I really think. »

The real Akim

With writing, Akim Gagnon thus finally encountered his true identity, while on the contrary, his father is the very example of a masculinity that had difficulty defining himself other than through the identity conferred on him by his place in society. Granby in the past simple implicitly traces the portrait of an era that did not keep its commitments to a working class that had been promised comfort and peace of mind.

When his factory lays off hundreds of employees, Akim’s father also loses one of the few foundations of his personal esteem. “The factory, the ham at Christmas, the holidays – it suited him perfectly, observes the author. My father believed in that system and overnight, he was told that what he believed in would no longer work, that he had to go back to school. »

The last sentence of Granby in the past simple ? “I’m Richard Gagnon’s guy. »

“If that were the last sentence I write, Akim confides with a smile full of tenderness, that would sum it all up. »

Granby in the past simple

Akim Gagnon

The Wick

416 pages