In your essay, you try to imagine the different faces that the beauty of a novel could take, rather than trying to define it with very precise criteria. For what reasons?
I have no strict definition of the beauty of the novel. Beauty is a matter of perception. I wanted to make this essay a very open reflection on what that could be. I don’t have all the answers, these are entry points. For me, this is a book about the reader. It’s also a reflection on reading, in many ways. For example, why don’t we reread novels that often? Firstly, because it’s long. There are so many more to read… It’s not like a piece of music that lasts three minutes and that you can listen to on repeat.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
Essayist and professor of literature at McGill University, Isabelle Daunais
But I also tell myself that perhaps one reading is enough. There is the risk of breaking the spell with a rereading. Reading the novel is memorial. We keep the novel within ourselves, we come back to it, we think about it, and this material which remains in us, sometimes it remains sufficiently in us. The novels that struck us, we remember very well the place where we were, the chair in which we read them.
You write that the amount of subjectivity is particularly high in the appreciation of a novel…
The beauty of the novel is not just the work of the novelist. There is also what we bring to it ourselves. It’s played by two people. For me, the beauty of the novel is not primarily a matter of style. It’s a contributing element, but I would say it’s even an almost minor element. A novel can also be beautiful because you read it at the right time. It’s a matter of chance and luck. If I had read it two years earlier or two years later, it would not have had the same effect.
In this case, how can you recommend a novel to another person?
I think we can recommend a novel because it is interesting, it is rich, it has a beautiful story. But it’s very difficult to recommend a novel for its beauty because we risk creating expectations that won’t be met due to this subjectivity. My playlist won’t necessarily be yours. So there is a form of solitude. The novel is oneself and the work. It’s something almost intimate, private. But that’s part of the game.
You give the example, in your essay, of the famous novel by Louis Hémon, Maria Chapdelainewhich is “a very beautiful novel” because of its construction, in particular, despite the fact that it is never approached from this perspective. You also mention The great Meaulnesby Alain-Fournier, which, for generations of readers, has been a beautiful novel – in your opinion because its few pages filled with dreams and nostalgia have been magnified by the drama of the author, who died in the war . Among contemporary novels, are there any that could be described as “beautiful”?
Two contemporary novels that I find very beautiful in their composition, their form, it is Good use of the starsby Dominique Fortier, and Nora Websterby Colm Tóibín, which is a novel of great simplicity. In this portrait of a woman, there is an accuracy, an economy, a parsimony, a balance of parts that I find beautiful. Beauty is based on several criteria, such as harmony, but it also relies a lot on what it leaves in us. We cannot see the beauty of a novel in its entirety, like a piece of music or a painting. You can glimpse it when you have just finished it; there is this moment, which can last a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, sometimes, which stays within us.
For me, Tolstoy’s novels are always beautiful novels. I find myself giving examples in the book that I draw from all over the history of the novel. I wanted to multiply the avenues, so as never to say: there you go, a beautiful novel, that’s it. […] You can write a beautiful story and do it very poorly, just as you can tell an insignificant story and do it very well. Madame Bovaryby Gustave Flaubert, it is not a grandiose story, it is a fairly simple plot, but it is a beautiful novel because there is an art of composition, of form, of the balance of parts — there is a whole game between the main character and the secondary characters. There is no recipe, but these are questions that the writer must ask himself.
The beauty of the novel
Boreal
168 pages