We laugh quite a bit, in the new choral novel by journalist Hugo Meunier, Ordinary sins. But we sometimes laugh a little dully, too. And that’s intentional. Because behind this deliberately sloppy tone which runs through the novel, the former The Press who wields the pen in Urbania for several years he has still found a way to approach quite serious subjects in passing.
His feat is to have assembled seven seemingly independent stories, but which, we quickly realize, are in fact all linked to each other.
“My starting point for this whole project was my story about gluttony. I thought I had a good idea, but I couldn’t flesh it out into a novel. So I built around it,” he confides in front of his usual latte at the Brûlerie St-Denis Masson, where he spent hours writing, rereading and polishing “so that all the ends work” . A book first written largely during an extended trip to South America with his family last year.
Because this novel, his fourth in fiction, is the one in which he has invested the most effort, the author of Missed, one of the books given by François Legault to French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal during his recent visit to Quebec.
“Everyday sinners”
Quickly, the idea of imagining stories around the seven deadly sins took shape; sins which are, let us remember, in addition to gluttony, pride, jealousy, lust, avarice, anger and laziness. “The deadly sins are something I’ve had in mind for a while. We have thrown religion down the drain, but we are all everyday sinners. It’s a lot on social networks – we sin from vanity in showing ourselves; When someone dies, the person who died becomes highly secondary to the moment you experienced with them,” he illustrates.
A whole gallery of characters inspired by his own entourage embodies them and these characters even end up reminding us, in one way or another, of people we know.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Hugo Meunier
If there had been a subtitle to this novel, it would be: a novel that you can read by looking in the mirror. Because I think we all know someone who could just about check something off somewhere.
Hugo Meunier
But its primary goal was to play with our perceptions, stereotypes, our prejudices. Hugo Meunier leads us along and we fall right into the trap, from the first story – Pride –the one he says he had the most fun writing with Gluttony.
The art of punch
Today, Hugo Meunier feels that he can finally add “author” to his title of journalist; that he is no longer just “a journalist who writes books”. But writer, no, very little for the one who says he doesn’t tick the pride box among the deadly sins.
“I am not proud; I do very nono reporting, I’m never afraid to make people laugh at me! Greedy, that goes without saying, he said, patting his belly, but it’s a bit dull as sin! »
Quickly skipping the greed – “not at all!” » – he gets bogged down in nonsense when it comes to talking about lust, to the point of completely forgetting the last two deadly sins. Between two laughs, he concedes that he asks himself “more questions than the average person on these issues”, then backtracks by saying he wants to preserve his girlfriend “in all that”, and recalls the immersion reports that he had carried out on behalf of The Press in swingers clubs more than 15 years ago.
If we laugh while reading Ordinary sins, as with this “a bit of a caricature of the girl who is a bit of a douchebag” story, inspired by a news item, the author himself had a lot of fun connecting the seven stories and finding punches for each one. between them, without ever planning anything. “I give myself the luxury of surprising myself, so when I arrive with a punch, I give myself a high five,” he says, smiling.
Hugo Meunier still dreams of one day writing a book that would be “100% comic”. Because, according to him, Ordinary sins still carries a little touch of drama. In the meantime, he is working on a children’s series which should be published in the fall, a series that he is writing with his 11-year-old daughter in mind, a big reader who reads everything… except her books. The good news, he says, is that writing is one of the few professions “where you can get better over time.” “It’s certain that I haven’t punched my card in the world of writing; I love it, it’s my passion! »
Ordinary sins
Stanké
416 pages