It is obvious: one does not read in the same way a posthumous novel like The boy with upside down feet by François Blais than any other book, especially when its author himself made the decision to leave, and when the posthumous novel in question speaks of disappearance.
But we manage, at times, to ignore our sadness, because The boy with upside down feet, published last September less than five months after the death of the writer, is one of his best books. And while it’s aimed at a youth readership ages 12 and up, you won’t see anything in it, in the writing or in the story, that would radically distinguish it from the rest of his work.
In Saint-Sévère, a tiny village in the Mauricie region, Joey, a child who is both naive and strangely sagacious, evaporates into nature, without her catatonic mother or her spineless stepfather worrying too much. In order to find the child, Adrienne Ferron, her 14-year-old neighbor, calls her friend Léonie for reinforcements, and still feels a little bad for being so happy to be able to spend the day with the one she constantly fears. to be rejected.
It will often have been said of François Blais that he was the Réjean Ducharme of his generation, a comparison not exactly eccentric, which had its limits.
But where Ducharme and François Blais come together perhaps most — The boy with upside down feet will be the ultimate demonstration of this – in their ability to shape strong and sovereign female characters, distrustful, funny and charitable, like this Adrienne, in which I am tempted to see the profile of François, even if I know that I am perhaps looking a little too much for the author between the lines of fiction.
Above all, don’t lie
I had the chance to interview François Blais a few times. Our last email exchange dates back to August 2, 2021. In anticipation of the day August 12, I buy a Quebec book, I collected testimonials from writers about their favorite bookstore for the daily newspaper I was collaborating with at the time. .
François could easily have offered me a little white lie and told me, for example, about the Exèdre of Trois-Rivières — I know he had a real affection for its co-owner Audrey Martel, one of his most generous readers.
But it turns out that François was reading Quebec books on a tablet, which he had to buy online, and bestsellers Americans, which he was hacking. No question of denying reality, even in a perfectly innocuous way, in order to see his name and his face in the newspaper, a step that almost anyone would have taken without thinking about it. “I still can’t say that my favorite bookseller is Jeff Bezos,” he wrote to me, a sentence that makes me laugh every time I reread it.
Why am I telling you all of this ? Because this is undoubtedly one of the most recurring features of the universe of François Blais, a feature that Adrienne shares, this rejection of the theater from the world of adults, whose petty hypocrisy sometimes seems to be the mortar.
There is a melancholy that veils all of François Blais’ work, a disenchantment specific to this precise moment when teenagers realize that adults feel no shame in betraying what they claim to believe in.
Other books?
François tried in this same email to dissuade me from reading his novel which was about to appear, The only thing that interests everyone (The Instant), which I nevertheless told him that I was in a hurry to discover, and that was not being polite. “I’m not sure if you should delve into my youngest. Tsé, it’s science fiction, and if it’s not your cup of tea, you might find it boring. »
François Blais was not a literary star, but had many fervent disciples, who defended at every opportunity his place among the greatest Quebec writers.
These words have already reached his ears, I know, but I often wonder, since that Sunday in May, if he really heard them, if, unlike Adrienne, he had managed to stop doubting the sincerity of admiration, affection of others towards him.
Will there be other books by François Blais? He certainly – his editor at L’instant meme Geneviève Pigeon confirms this to me – left texts behind him, in different states of completion, unlike the Boy with upside down feetwhich he had finished editing not long before leaving.
Texts that Geneviève does not imagine working with anyone other than François, whose characters were lazy, but who was the type to square each sentence until it was to his liking. The problem ? François Blais is no longer there. Except in his books where, I hope he would forgive me, I will continue to look everywhere for his discreet smile.
A tribute to François Blais will be paid at the Salon du livre de Montréal during the Cabaret de la mémoire vivant, on November 23 at 7:30 p.m.
The boy with upside down feet
Francois Blais
Fides
320 pages