This 26e novel crowns 25 years of career for Jean-François Beauchemin who, with a pen as skillful as ever and even in the face of the darkest subjects, manages to breathe luminosity, light as the wind which blows lazily on the pages of this story family.
In the epilogue, the narrator confesses to wishing that people would say: “Oh, it wasn’t a very thrilling story and very of its time, sarcastic and nihilistic, told in a convulsive style with many modern references. But there were people there who lived as best they could with each other. » A lucid desire, since The light wind, far from boasting a gripping and convoluted plot, tells with gentleness and poetry, at the dawn of the 1970s, the daily life of the Cresson family grappling with a tragedy: the slow decline of a mother devoured by cancer , supported by her six children and her husband. It is through the eyes of cadet Leonard that this solidarity in adversity is narrated, nestled in the countryside and expressed far from everyone, while History continues to punctuate the passing days. Children with astonishing maturity, a father drowned in carpentry and the verses of Baudelaire, a resigned mother… This painting, which could have been depicted with dark shades, opts instead for pastel colors and the path of quiet luminosity.
The light wind
Quebec America
184 pages