“It all begins in the mud” and ends in a feast worthy of the great Gallic banquets where one reaps the fruits of one’s labor, where one feasts until one is no longer hungry. In a first collection of short stories, even a very first title, Etienne Goudreau-Lajeunesse abruptly places humans in front of the passing of time, the Machine and the purposes of existence.
Title as intriguing as it is impactful, Pigletsjust published by Boréal, it is a look at humanity, an apnea dive into the heart of the lives of a few characters linked together by this need to go to the end of oneself, to move forward, often at against the tide, to live intensely in the present moment.
Marginals, “a handful of crazy people”, pigheads living in a regulated world set like clockwork. From a farm in Saint-Miracle-de-l’Espoir, in which we proceed with respect and homage to the butchery of Isis, this “brave sow who […] offers his meat”, until “Cochoncetés, second course” – where the same family gathers around a table ready to feast in honor of the sow whose head sits in the center of the table – there is notably Phyllistin, hero of “The Unfinished”. A painter who will persist until his last days working on the same canvas. With his “skeletal fingers closed on the worn brush”, he will accumulate layers of paint and will have made in total “several hundred paintings contained in a single one”. This need to enclose time in his work “the one which transforms everything, which corrodes and which destroys” makes this character a being apart, sincere, rooted in his convictions. Likewise Marielle, political science student, defender of nature, committed, creative pomegranates stuffed with wild seeds — “yarrow, wild chicory, white sweet clover, and saskatoon berry” — advance like Marianne leading the revolutionaries.
Ten short stories, each as impactful as the next, in which Goudreau-Lajeunesse offers offbeat characters, models of freedom presented in a vigorous, elegant and refined style. Solid and consistent prose in which punctuation is rare. Reflection of this passing time? Of this accelerated life managed by a society blinded and breathless by performance? Certainly, a writing of finesse, incisive and penetrating which grips, grips by its authenticity as well as by the richness of the reflections.
Without praising anything – on the contrary, the author stays far from the conventional and other diktats – he rigorously presents different points of view on the world, which end up irremediably coming together somewhere at the center of Earth. And in each of these stories, there is this perceptible red thread, reminiscent of Lavoisier’s famous phrase, which sets the record straight, where nothing is lost, nothing is created and everything is transformed. Where these filth, like a simple cycle, a turn of the clock, returns to the earth to feed the “micro-organisms favoring the cultivation of cereals and vegetables”. Famous.