In Backlash, his 15e novel, Marie Laberge talks about the collateral damage of a massacre. But above all, she still talks about life. We met her.
Marie Laberge is 70 years old, but still the same childish energy, the same fast-moving singing voice, the same mischievous smile. His desire to communicate and get to the bottom of things is also intact: after 46 years of career, the urgency to write to testify to human nature has not faded.
“I wouldn’t write otherwise. Too much work! », She launches in a deserted cafe animated by his very presence. There is therefore no question of “writing in order to write”, just because it is his job.
“I write when it happens, when I can’t take it anymore, when I know that if I don’t write, I’m not going to be okay. This morning again, I was trying to escape an idea that has steeped in my brain for years … It’s always strange, the books I struggle with, knowing that I will not escape them. ”
The starting point of Backlash : an armed man who enters a shop and who murders three very young women, the damage that this tragic event causes both in the families of the victims, that we get to know, and in that of the killer. Let’s say the subject is not light.
It is a human subject. And in humanity, there are flat ends and exhilarating ends. I don’t think I would have been able to write only about violence. Get inside the psychopath’s head and go… zero for me. It is not possible.
Marie Laberge
No question of giving him the floor, or even of trying to understand for a single second the one who flirts with the theory of incels.
“He is above all someone who has intense violence, a lot of power, and an immense powerlessness”, says Marie Laberge, who believes that her book is about the escalation of control, the refusal of separation and the difficulty of to become oneself.
Obsessions
If Marie Laberge chose to stage the aftermath of a massacre, it is for its brutality and its disproportionate side. Corn Backlash speaks above all of the life that continues once the ax has fallen, also of the guilt that gnaws and of the family as a microcosm of society. So many themes that are recurrent in her work, and that she likes to continue to explore.
” In The ceremony of angels, I had discussed Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In Those who remain, death by suicide. We can say that there is a small recurrence with me. It is my very nature: to explore how we live with death. ”
The writer and playwright realized as he grew older that we could not reinvent the wheel, but that we could “invent a melody which is ours, on the few notes which are ours”.
“And these notes are our obsessions. ”
In his case, life is one. And death is “what puts her in the limelight”, a fascinating analytical grid because it shakes as much as a love shock, because the characters and their life choices are revealed more in what looks like a small earthquake.
Feeding
Backlash is a very dense book, 500 well packed pages, but divided by short chapters which give it a rhythm, estimates Marie Laberge. If the trip was intense, it was also nourishing.
“There were so many characters that I thought were gifted for life in it! There are a lot of people, everyone had to have their place. ”
She also tackles a host of subjects, such as twinning, which is quite central, post-traumatic shock – the book walks between two eras, at the time of the killing and 18 months later -, parental competence, sexual exploration, social networks “which can sometimes be more violent than a weapon”.
In fact, it’s a very 2021 novel – except for the pandemic that the writer knowingly erased because it seemed anecdotal to her in relation to her story -, and in which she observes her contemporaries, in particular young women, that fascinate her a lot.
“They have a very different destiny, education and access to the world from mine. I have to remove everything I know about myself, and put myself with them. But I love to do it. ”
Among other things, she had a lot of fun chatting with her little nieces of 13, 14 years old, a question of discovering their vocabulary, their outlook on the world. “I loved these conversations. They are rich in knowledge that I cannot have. ”
But whether it is now or 20 or 40 years ago, its purpose has not changed: to give human beings an echo of themselves, with their fragility and their strength. “And the strongest is always the one who knows the weaknesses. ”
All sides
“Me, my business, it is to soak in humanity and to give an account of it”, says Marie Laberge, who noted over the years that whatever she writes, reality always catches up to her.
We cannot invent beyond what the world is. He is more fertile in wickedness and perversity, but also in strength and courage. Everything is here.
Marie Laberge
She likes to light both sides, avoiding “blissful vision” as much as total darkness. “When I write, I need life to remain life, not to be condemned. ”
That’s what she did in this book, which she started writing before the pandemic, and which is finally coming out on Wednesday. She is eager to meet readers in book fairs after 18 months of “barren wasteland” for communication, and pursues all kinds of crazy projects knowing that she will have to make choices, even if she still is. very fit. “How many more books am I going to be able to do?” She asks herself.
She especially hopes that Backlash “Will make a lot of friends”, that he will have a future of “brainstorming”, so that people want to “live harder, more intensely”.
But the rest, she knows, no longer depends on her. “I have worked demanding the best all the time, until the end of what I can do, with the experience that I have the worst. But now it’s up to people to tell me, not me. ”
In bookstores Wednesday
Backlash
Marie Laberge
Quebec America
504 pages