Paul-Serge Forest was inspired by his own experience as a doctor on the front lines during the pandemic to imagine the context of his second novel, Wear the mask. In a hotel transformed into a dispensary for the occasion, where he worked on the front line, he encountered death, fear, anger and the glaring lack of resources, but also resilience, self-sacrifice, wisdom and hope.
The writer has drawn from it a deeply human story, both funny and tragic, eminently political, which is absolutely not the one that anyone would have spontaneously thought of. That would have been to underestimate the author of Everything is ori (VLB, 2021); novel among the most indescribable offered by the Quebec literary world in the last decade.
In his crazy universe, COVID-19 becomes the Tennessee virus; a fever that crowds out sentence punctuation and makes patients expressionless and aphasic. In a motel converted into a hospital where increasingly ill victims are piled up, a delicious gallery of characters – Thomas, a young doctor, Joe Bassin, Tristan Tabarnac, five Marie-Èves, four Claudes, an architect and a handful nurses with inventive methods — give themselves body and soul to provide care and dignity to the sick. However, that’s without taking into account a troop of spies who infiltrate the group of merry men, and a family of thugs who make their money from trafficking in punctuation marks.
“At the height of the first wave, I learned that my first novel had won the Robert-Cliche prize, and that it would be published,” recalls the author, met on his terrace in Montreal. What’s special about this award is that you have to keep it a secret for a year. So I lived with this secret, which gave me permission, in a way, to embark on other novel projects. In the hotel-hospital, I had access to a multitude of stories. I really felt like a spy. This is what gave me the idea of writing a spy novel that would take place during a pandemic, and which would allow me to approach certain clichés that we have rehashed from a new angle. ad nauseamsuch as conspiracy theory, chaos in healthcare environments or the shortage of toilet paper. »
Paul-Serge Forest also found inspiration for this bizarre black market of punctuation marks during the tedious editing work of Everything is ori. “At the end, when we were worrying about the last minute details, I almost had the impression of misusing the punctuation marks. I thought it would be funny, a kind of SPCA, but for punctuation. Don’t ask me why I have such weird ideas. »
Literary spy
The result is the novel of all permissions. Those of focusing on a dozen different characters, of writing more than 500 pages, of quoting verbatim and repeatedly Joe Dassin’s greatest hits, of mixing espionage, sociological study and romance. The whole thing is explosive, funny and deeply sensory and erotic, even if the sexual relations take place through cameras, and the ingredients necessary to make a baby travel through heterogeneous channels.
The form embraces this multidirectional narration, setting up a game between the author, the reader and the characters. Here, the identities are multiple, as are the ways of putting oneself into a story – spies oblige – and the protagonists themselves dialogue with other fictional works.
Even if the proposition seems dizzying, the author takes care to anchor his story in truth: that of a place, and that of feelings. Thus, as in his previous novel, Paul-Serge Forest chose to situate his action on the North Shore, in Baie-Comeau, in the same slightly offbeat universe as Everything is ori. “That’s what I call my mental North Shore,” says the local native with a laugh. It’s a place that inspires me because it’s yet to be created in so many ways. It remains quite picturesque and remote in people’s minds. I wanted to depict a more current reality; these doctors who come from everywhere, these people forced to do all their shopping online, people who have a life as rich and fertile as anywhere else. »
The courage of love
Rich in digressions and hidden references, Wear the mask freelance among others in the creative universe of Paul Thomas Anderson, Alain Souchon, Fernando Pessoa and above all, brother Marie-Victorin and his Laurentian flora.
Paul-Serge Forest quotes the botanist from memory, on cannabis sativa, or cultivated hemp. “ “We even use it to make hashish which we smoke to obtain a kind of intoxication populated with delicious dreams.” This book is not only scientifically rigorous, it also opens the door to aesthetics and poetry. Dip in Laurentian flora allows me to name parts of reality that we forget to see, the asters, the goldenrods that grow everywhere these days. It reminds me of the importance of being aware of the world around me. »
The novelist deplores the fact that there is no more room for beauty – for the heart, in other words – in medicine; a lack which could have repaired certain errors or filled certain gaps in our collective and political treatment of the pandemic, errors and gaps which he does not fail to highlight in a roundabout way through his story.
“There are decisions that were made out of fear, but they were sold to us as decisions made out of love. However, love and fear are two completely different things. Care is one of the themes of my book. Caring requires courage, and courage is found in love. However, in the current health system, we prevent the creativity essential to care. We are prisoners of methods and practices successively put in place by governments in a management style that aims above all for efficiency. But science is not enough to fill the heart or give meaning to what we have been through collectively. That’s why I wanted my novel to also be one of love. »