For Myriam Beaudoin, literature is a meeting place. The opportunity to provoke the shock of beings whose paths would not otherwise cross, and to observe their reactions. In 2016, his novel Hadassa invited us to a school for girls in the Hasidic community of Outremont, while in 2019, her Epiphany recounted a woman’s desire to meet the flesh of her flesh.
An encounter is precisely what literature offers us that day, this time well anchored in reality, although this summer heat which persists in the colors of October has a surreal je ne sais quoi. In a café in La Petite-Patrie where, with the windows wide open, a beneficent wind blows over the people seated at the table, Myriam Beaudoin inhales the scent of fresh ink from her brand new novel, Mount Mirador.
An end of the world to oneself
If it is difficult to ignore the climate emergency in this disorderly autumn, it appears that this is appropriate since it is in the catastrophe that Mount Mirador took root: “The pandemic was a real wake-up call for me. It awakened my human fragility. I felt, for the first time, a real fear of the end of the world,” says the author.
Inhabited by the feeling that humanity was on the verge of being swept away, she immersed herself in the flood of Genesis, which she reread, captivated by its beauty and its depth: “Is a One day am I going to get rid of the Bible? I come back to it with each novel. Maybe it’s because I know it so little that I make so many discoveries each time. This story inspires me. »
She was then in the Laurentians, on her land where, she admits, she renamed the trees after the names of her dead. One tree in particular dominates the others: “A black spruce, majestic, larger and stronger than the others. It is my father’s tree and it is my place of contemplation. In these difficult times, I looked up to the sky and, turning towards its magnificent branches, I thought of this wonderful quote from Eckhart Tolle: “Escape is horizontal and peace is vertical.” I said to myself: “Okay, instead of staying there, hidden, suffering, being afraid, I’m going to rise to the highest, and I’m going to find a way to escape. ” »
In truth, it was in a small room that she achieved this. In a state close to meditation, she found writing: “Life is wonderful, but it’s not a big enough space. Writing is my world. When I write, I talk to no one about it, I don’t have a single line read. I’m afraid everything will be disrupted if I invite someone before it’s perfect. »
With her eyes closed, in this room made vast by the impulse of her creativity, she let the words carry her: “I compose my sentences out loud. Rhythm is really important to me. The language, its sound, is also what constructs the story. »
Behind closed doors at the top of the world
Escape is precisely what the protagonist of the novel, Marie, undertakes. “The images captured by helicopter revealed the tsunami mud rushing for kilometers, swelling with trees, electricity poles, buildings and bits of road. Isolated people were screaming on rooftops, hoping to be seen and rescued,” writes Myriam Beaudoin as the curtain-raiser to her novel.
Abandoning everything behind her, Marie tries to escape the mud and narrowly rescues a frail child. Together, they reach a summit which offers a panoramic view, allowing them to anticipate the dangers to come. However, this refuge is first and foremost that of François, a hermit who, heir to an uncle who saw the catastrophe coming, built a haven of peace where he lives in self-sufficiency.
Even more than a disaster story, Mount Mirador is the story of this meeting, improbable and nevertheless inevitable, of two dissimilar beings who, in their final corners, must resist together: “I wanted characters who came from different backgrounds. Stuck on a very small platform hoisted a few meters from the ground, face to face, who reveal themselves or not, but in any case who are confronted, together, with the end of something, with chaos, with destruction, with a flood .What will they deliver? What are they going to keep secret? »
The accelerated time of flight is then followed by a slowness where the characters, vulnerable, unmask themselves: “Marie is astral, strong, ogress, sinner and profoundly optimistic, with a faith turned towards the sky. I liked to imagine him larger than life in relation to François, down to earth, uncouth, who does not speak, who even forgot that the end of the world would arrive, so anchored in a present punctuated by the cycle of seasons, harvests, breeding. »
The author, with her eyes open this time, still seems imbued with these hours spent working with her protagonists. His words swirl in the noisy café, but from which we escape to find this small allegorical platform, stretched between three miraculous pines of the Mount Mirador where, suspended between telluric and astral forces, we spent a few dizzying hours reading.
A community nature
At the heart of the “boreal attic”, the writer makes it her duty to name the living in all its forms. Its characters hold ancestral knowledge and, like Colette’s Sido, can anticipate the next day through signs such as the direction of fire flames, the flow of sap from trees and the behavior of animals.
Myriam Beaudoin talks about her inspiring reading of Forest woman by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and his desire to recognize what lives: “Knowledge of the plant, what nourishes us. I find it eminently poetic. Everything that surrounds us and that we don’t know. What saved us, what allowed all those generations that came before us to survive. I want to reclaim that. »
Inspired by the flood and creator of a protagonist with a vibrant faith, the writer, who admits to having grown up in a Catholic family, does not believe in the imminent revival of religious fervor: “I think that religious faith is dead. What comes back, especially in times of disaster, are human values. No need to go to mass or believe in God to open up to others, to believe in solidarity, in kindness, in community, in luminous beauty and in nature. »
The evocation of light reminds Myriam Beaudoin of a verse by Leonard Cohen. It is there, between us, which escapes our memories. We could give up on her search, but, in this café where, ironically, the sun always penetrates strongly, she insists. She’s right, because after a moment: “There is a crack in everything, that’s where the light enters.” ” There you have it, Mount Mirador : the announced catastrophe of the end of the world through which pierces, with resolution, the luminous human desire to bring another day into the world.