This is a very special gift that Anaël Turcotte makes to us with A kind of rebirth, a first novel against a backdrop of (false) police investigation, taking place in 2153 in a retro-futuristic Quebec returned to the time of the Great Darkness.
What exactly happened that history was “well and truly over”, as the vain old professor Lord Dubuc told his students, and that the province reverted to a feudal system which now seems to have only reason to be contented, even forced, happiness?
The answer to this question is not central to the story proposed by the author from Dégelis. What we do know is that the characters from the village of Monojoly are convinced that they have reached “the end of humanity”, where nothing can happen anymore. All except Ludmilla, a young girl carrying within her the impetuous torrents of revolt.
The mysterious murder of a sheep (“a mouticide”) will shake the village, causing a debacle that will affect the characters, in search of a truth that goes beyond them. An inspector with dubious methods will try to shed light on this affair, while Lord Dubuc, mysteriously disappeared, is held hostage in the depths of the woods by a hermit “with a melting face” who will try to redo his education.
A kind of rebirth is carried by a contrasting writing oscillating between popular and sustained language, serving to bring into the world an abundant and unexpected romantic universe, where one sometimes gets lost in the maze of the story, as the characters lose themselves in themselves, without caught on a reality in the fleeting sense. A rather catchy read, but the end of which is somewhat perplexing, like an unfinished thought.
A kind of rebirth
Anael Turcotte
Triptych
208 pages