For most people, Friday represents the end of a working week. But for the literary Pierre-Éric Villeneuve, who lives on his “parallel planet”, this Friday means rather the completion of a project that he has been nurturing for years – the consecration of an entire life dedicated to reading, end of a very long breath.
This ex-literature teacher has been reading out loud for 17 days, six hours a day, all the books in the cycle Thirsty of Marie-Claire Blais, almost without stopping. Friday afternoon, he will end his performance by reading the last sentence of what he considers the last real work of the series, the posthumous book Augustino or enlightenmentreleased earlier this fall.
commas
“I’m tired,” he says, laughing, in an interview with The duty last Tuesday. “I have to stay very focused on the commas for six hours. Let’s say that at the end of a sentence, I take a deep breath. The books in the series contain almost no dots. The longest sentence is almost 150 pages. I read it this afternoon! adds Mr. Villeneuve, satisfied.
This is truly a performance, in every sense of the word. Mr. Villeneuve reads at the art center Le Lieu, in the Saint-Roch district of Quebec. The public is invited to come and listen to it. Its reading is even broadcast outside the Venue, via a loudspeaker. “It brings a happy dimension, it encourages me, but fortunately, I was well prepared,” he said.
However, it was not to attract attention or to exercise excess that this literature enthusiast embarked on such a project. “It’s to transmit the genius of Blais,” he explains, and above all, to encourage reading: “I want all of Quebec to get on Blais time. Is Blais difficult? Yes, but it’s like anything, by taking good habits, you can read it. »
Voluntary isolation
Pierre-Éric Villeneuve recognizes this, he leads a “parallel” lifestyle which helps him to read a lot. And in his case, a lot is an understatement. He notably read the cycle Thirsty (1995 to 2022) a “fifteen” times. The cycle officially comprises ten volumes, and M. Villeneuve considers that Petites Cendres or capture (2020) and Augustino or enlightenment (2022) are extensions of it.
He therefore reread the series each time a new volume appeared, since the publication of the first work in the series, also entitled Thirsty, in 1995. In preparation for his performance, since last May he has also read the entire cycle five more times. “It’s more than 15,000 pages,” he says.
Among other things, to improve his reading habits, Mr. Villeneuve carried out, at the dawn of the 2000s, a “radical withdrawal from teaching”. He thus wanted to “protect all forms of poetry” in his life. “Even though I have a critique of work and have made freedom choices as high as possible, there is intermittent food work. I am not an annuitant. I have no pension. […] But everything is organized to protect my life from the spirit. »
The ex-teacher now lives alone in his house, on the banks of a river, in the Quebec region. “I made a bet on invisibility,” he said. Smartphones are also prohibited at home. Mr. Villeneuve also does not have a social media account. “I did everything to prioritize poetry. He even claims to have been inspired, in a way, by the author herself. “She spent decades devoted to reading and writing. It is a life of asceticism. »
The emotion of reading
A specialist in Virginia Woolf, Mr. Villeneuve recounts having devoted his entire life to “modernist authors”. He notably notices similarities in the way the two writers dealt with the psychology of their characters. “Woolf was a muse of Marie-Claire Blais. There are many times woolfiens in his novels. »
Admiringly, Mr. Villeneuve qualifies the work of Blais as “elevated”. She is “close to the Greeks and the Shakespearean tragedy at the same time,” he says. […] Blais is also the beauty of not entertaining. There is not a word in Thirsty where she entertains us. It is of great internal coherence, of an extraordinary narrative scope. »
Is Blais difficult? Yes, but it’s like anything, by taking good habits, you can read it.
The death of the writer, in November 2021, deeply saddened him. “When you are literary, you can be in mourning for the authors you love,” he sighs. This is also what convinced him to make his performance project a reality, even though he had been dreaming about it for “two or three years” already.
On Friday, Mr. Villeneuve will therefore complete this ambitious project, but he will not stop reading passionately, as he always has. “This week alone, I have been caught up in intense emotions. I still cry at least once a day while reading,” he says, moved, before summing up: “Everything is there for the book to continue. »