From Brothers (2013), David Clerson constructs one of the most magnificently strange works of Quebec literature. He keeps digging in My son only came back seven days his obsession with wetlands, populated by swarms of bugs, at the heart of which family ties are both handcuffs and anchors.
In her chalet in the Mauricie, an aging woman is visited by her son, who left her several years ago to sink alone on the roads of a hostile America, giving her only news of confused letters. and paranoid sent from the most reclusive corners of the continent.
“The first day my son confided to me that he felt his brain was rotting. […] More and more often in his dreams he saw mushrooms growing in his head. These took root in his cortex, proliferated there. The mother and her son, worn out prematurely by wandering, quickly reconnect with the peat bog they liked to visit together, the one whose center seems to act like a black hole, surrounded by sphagnum.
The greatest quality of David Clerson, in this fourth book, is that he remains one of the too rare writers refusing to explain everything that happens in his novels. Novels that he anchors in essentially realistic universes, but which always share a border with the paranormal, as well as with the forces of an ancient world, whose immemorial aspect is as much a source of anguish as of comfort.
Proliferating with descriptions of fungi, plants and insects, this brief chronicle of a woman’s entry into a long night of the soul employs the murky beauty of an enigmatic nature as the magnifying mirror of the inner life of its beleaguered characters. Lucidity is with them not only the wound closest to the sun, but also the shortest path to insanity.
My son only comes back seven days
David Clerson
Heliotrope
126 pages