A man, interned in an “institute”, recalls snippets of his childhood on his family’s dairy farm. In this establishment where we take perhaps a little too long to understand what ailment he is treating, he tells the story of life in the countryside, in a small village in Quebec, as many generations before his knew it.
“A life without vacations and without excuses, to empty ourselves emptying cows. » An existence “counted in liters of milk”, made up of ups and downs, moments sometimes funny, sometimes dark, marked by the suicide of an aunt or a cousin, the eccentricity of a grandmother whose the perfume is similar to “the fruity smell of rum”, trout fishing with the grandfather or even the visit of the priest which clearly tells the mother “that it is time to add a new little one farmer at the board.”
With a touch of dark humor, this first novel evokes the land of these children of the 1980s who were not forced to abandon school to help on the farm, although it was at the heart of their daily life . Juggling the fabrications of his mind, the narrator sometimes loses the reader, but quickly succeeds in bringing us back into his world as a dreaming child who grew up without a safety net. And if only for these images of rural life that he succeeds in evoking so well, we will want to immerse ourselves in this novel which is part of the new wave of local literature.
Raw milk
Alto
264 pages