As a helpless spectator, Pierre, a literature professor in a Sherbrooke CEGEP, witnesses the slow and inexorable erosion of the world around him, and to which he belongs.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
As he sinks deeper into his status as a fifty-year-old white man, convinced that he is slipping down the slope of monounclitude, his questions about the course taken by Quebec society (is there only one?) lead into the lukewarm bath of skepticism. In the background, the anxiety of seeing the years go by and the observation of the decline of those around him and of himself. “There is something humiliating about growing old. I’m not talking about the body or even the dress. Just: to be there. »
Starting from the student revolt of 2012 to the pandemic of 2020, without letting himself sink completely, the teacher poses as a disillusioned observer; witness of his companion struggling with a moribund university, of his students for whom literature seems a distant relic, of his colleagues ending up hanging up, of this immigrant lecturer struggling to find his place… I was right next to laid a reflection to which many readers will have already been able to indulge, consciously or not, and of which they will find echoes and fragments in this polyphonic story.
I was right next to
Patrick Nicol
The Quartermaster
200 pages