“This is what was brewing in the greasy and sugary backstage of these walls, what was carried by the echo of the air ducts and this plaster almost a century old: stories, secrets and hopes.” A little more than two years later The island without a bridge (XYZ, 2022), Yannick Marcoux, also a literary critic at Dutysigns a second novel entitled I work in noiseThis time, Félix, the author’s alter ego, takes us to a Mile End bar in the late 1990s.
Between a university education in sociology that interests him little and a few friendships that are crumbling before his eyes, Félix, 21, wanders around the city. One evening, attracted by “an enthusiastic breath of brass”, he pushes open the door of L’Uchronie. In this aptly named pub, since it is the fictional reconstruction of a real establishment located on Laurier Avenue, just west of Saint-Laurent Boulevard, the captivating scents of beer float and the wild notes of jazz fly. The bar is a character, that is undeniable, but it is also a theater where the author skillfully unfolds his story.
Little by little, Félix becomes part of L’Uchronie, makes friends with the employees, contemplates the fauna that the musicians, alcohol, drugs and desire lead into an exhilarating trance. There is no doubt that he is living a community experience that constitutes a sublime outlet for its participants. One day, Félix is offered a job as a waiter, which he accepts with enthusiasm. “Every evening, the nightlife updated its spectacle and gave me the impression of having experienced nothing. I was overexcited. The adventure was only just beginning.”
We then discover a rich gallery of characters, colleagues and customers, sympathetic or detestable, that the author affectionately draws. Among the employees of the bar, we are attached above all to Simon, an alcoholic with a flamboyant personality. As for the customers, there are those of the present, like Mamadou, passionate about Coltrane, and Gérard, who introduces Félix to the concept of impermanence, and those who magically emerge from the past, like Santiago, the Portuguese widower in love with the owner of the bar, Françoise, the one who always has her nose in a book.
Initiatory novel
Félix is above all a spectator, a passer-by, a witness gifted at observing and describing, but who rarely addresses what he feels. However, by telling us about the adventures of the place, his second home for more than ten years, he gives us access to the development of his thoughts and his sensitivity. It is in reality about himself that he speaks to us when he relates the time when a customer had an epileptic fit, the time when a brick was thrown through the window by activists, the time when an armed robbery took place and the time when a man was found dead in the toilets. In this sense, the book is an initiatory novel, a quest for identity and spirituality that Kerouac would not deny.
The narrator addresses us in a confessional tone, in a simple but careful language, where nothing is superfluous. We feel his youth and his dreams, his conviction and his idealism. Some chapters are more introspective, others more anecdotal, still others lucidly address social issues, such as poverty, homelessness, drug addiction and gentrification. But the most beautiful pages are undoubtedly those where Félix describes the exaltation that music produces in him. “The drums, supported by the double bass, prevented the trumpet from flying away, wrapping it in the cavalcade of its drums, supporting a frantic rhythm that swelled and swelled, creating an immense wave that threatened to engulf us. […] The music sucked me in, my feet tapped out and my jaw shook with the staccato.