Although it was partly written “during a period of active drug addiction”, No need for enemies has nothing of the caricatural opacity of certain texts laid under influence.
Posted at 5:00 p.m.
It is with a suffocating absence of lyricism that Julien Guy-Béland testifies in this autobiographical novel of a daily life that he tries to free from all the violence, real or symbolic, which handcuffs him to anxiety.
Examination of a toxic friendship, portrait of the twisted relations between the employees of a bar, auscultation of all the insidious forms that toxic masculinity takes: this second book is both a condemnation of the repeated abuses to which people belonging to all forms margins are submitted, and a reminder that these margins – here, the nightlife and punk music circles – are not without tormentors.
On a formal level, Julien Guy-Béland relies in particular on the tool of accumulation, in a telegraphic writing that ends up hypnotizing when it lists the substances and the states they induce (a process dear to the late Guillaume Dustan). The writer takes the opposite view of a seductive idea that literature saves lives, a discourse which is perhaps not entirely false, but which dumps on books responsibilities which should be those of the social safety net. “Writing is not a liberating activity for me. »
This exposure, however, does not contribute to fetishizing drugs, but to destigmatize those who use them, by confronting its contradictions with a society that struggles to offer psychological support to those who need it, but which ostracizes anyone who fails in the most important of his duties as a citizen: to be productive.
No need for enemies
Julien Guy-Beland
Heliotrope
156 pages