While going to the Mont-Royal cemetery with her mother, a woman discovers the tombstone of a man she knew in the 1960s, in Abitibi: “I knew him Barabbas, who did not have it. known ! In Val-d’Or everyone knew him, as those who recovered their memories by listening to my mother’s account of the cemetery and the papers have said. However, as the narrator of Anne Élaine Cliche’s bewitching novel reveals later (The pisseuse, The holy fathousand), The dancer of La Macaza: “No one knew who Barabbas was. “
From then on, she embarks on an almost mystical quest in order to discover the true identity of this man whose epitaph brings him closer to the prophet Elijah: “In a whirlwind / I climbed / On fire horses / I will return / As promised to those who knew me / They are legion ”.
Métis, Algonquin, Jewish, Russian? Legend, messiah, prophet? No one has ever known where this ageless man who mastered several languages came from, who spoke as if he was quoting the Scriptures, letting children and adults come to him, occupying a public bench that the narrator does not arrive. to describe despite its many attempts. It is moreover his way of narrating that first surprises the reader.
Marrying the convolutions of a boiling thought, the narration obeys a punctuation with a singular breath. The voice of the narrator, who repeats sentences and takes up passages from her story as if she wanted to perfect them or make sure not to forget anything, are grafted those of her interlocutors to the fallible memory. One believes that Barabbas is a former classmate; another, who begs the narrator to make room for him in her book, takes him for a former lover. The more the research advances, the more the mystery thickens, the more elusive Barabbas seems.
Then, a talkative man enters the scene who is willing to make some revelations to the narrator: “Leopold Bloom looks at me slightly triumphant: he guesses that I am the niece or the daughter of the Minister while I cannot understand his connection to Barabbas nor the role he plays in this theater of which I am the recipient. “
Although she knows more about Barabbas, despite the procrastination of her interlocutor, the contours of the character remain hazy. And the novel is increasingly confusing, adopting various forms, including that of a dramaticule, where voices from the past and present re-tell their side of the story.
While the learned narrator draws parallels between Barabbas and various biblical figures, she comments on passages from the Torah. In doing so, she brings to life, like the narrator of Jonah of memory, parts of the history of Abitibi, including deforestation, through that of the Jewish community and Aboriginal people. By revisiting the country of her roots with so much fervor, she thus keeps the memory of her own late father alive: “All the versions of the story I am reporting here have the texture of what gave birth to me. “