“I am made up of equal parts pessimism and optimism,” says Stanley Péan, who signs with Twilight a collection of short stories, his first in 15 years, based on the same fragile balance.
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“I am the age that I am”, laughs the writer who published his first book in 1988, at only 22 years old, and who has devoted himself a lot in recent years to the genre of the essay with the masterful Preferably at night (2019). “I too have had injuries, heartaches, things that you think you won’t survive, even if you end up realizing that you still survive. At 56, you’re not going to throw yourself off a balcony because it didn’t work out with the person you love. »
What to do instead? Despite everything, continue to believe in it, like the characters who populate Twilighta scintillating collection of short stories in which tried beings try not to despair of their loves and the stultifying world in which they live, and who cling to these essential nourishments which are literature and music.
It will soon be understood that the twilight to which the title refers is as much that of the sun which has just set as that of the sun which is about to rise. Carried by this melancholy specific to the awareness that all happiness ends up being blunted one day, but also by the joy of knowing that each morning renews the possibility of discovering his new song or his new favorite person, the writing of Stanley Péan advances between sadness and gratitude.
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
Stanley Pean
Gratitude in particular towards the creators he admires, including Claude Mathieu. In a short story entitled “Bootleg”, Péan’s alter ego, Marvin Courage, tries the devil to add a long-coveted record to his collection, a nod to the short story “The Pilgrim of Bythinia” from The Exquisite Death (1965), one of only three books by this sadly underrated Quebec writer.
“It’s a terrible case of assassinated Mozart”, explains Péan about one of the rare authors of his time who dared to write the fantastic and who would choose silence after having been “shot down in flames by the camp of the nationalists playing because he wrote in dictionary French, and by the supporters of psychological realism, who did not understand his stories of carnivorous plants and time travel”.
Haiti my country
Born in Port-au-Prince, Stanley Péan arrived in Saguenay when he was only 8 months old. In the wake of the Parent report, Quebec hired a number of teachers, including his father, who would teach literature in Jonquière. The young Stanley was won over by literature thanks to two “initial shocks”: Albert Camus – he read The Stranger at 14 – and Twilight Zonethe legendary series, several episodes of which were scripted by authentic writers.
If the pandemic and a tense political climate kept him far from the country of his origins, Twilight becomes the opportunity to return to their native land, through fiction. In “Crossing the Cape with the ancestor »a woman goes to Cap-Haitien with her mother’s ashes, accompanied wherever she goes by the ghost of the national poet, Oswald Durand (1840-1906), who is also, moreover, the rear -great-great-grandfather of Stanley Péan.
When I was young, it got on my nerves to be reminded that if I was a writer, it was thanks to the blood of Oswald. I believe in free will. If it’s Oswald’s blood that makes me a writer, all my brothers should be writers.
Stanley Pean
He smiles. “But since then, I have made peace with Oswald. »
Incurable pessimism
Last August, Stanley Péan’s daily radio broadcast on ICI Musique, When the jazz is there, went from its 5:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. time slot to the later one, from 10 p.m. to midnight. The migration upset the habits of many “friends of the blue note”, as the facilitator calls them, for whom the aperitif could only be sipped in his company.
Flattered, the radio man, by the outcry provoked on social networks by this change? “It did not surprise me in any case”, admits the one who won the Bruce-Lundvall prize last summer, awarded by the Montreal International Jazz Festival to a non-musician personality who has contributed in an exceptional way to the influence of jazz. . “Jazz was in this time slot for 25 years. A good part of our listeners listen to the radio like we go to mass, and we rushed them in a cavalier way, overnight. »
What’s more Haitian about Stanley Péan? “There is a fatalism in me, alas,” he replies. A fatalism that we recognize in several of his characters, overwhelmed by a thunderous era, where everyone talks and no one listens. “But I try to believe that there is also a love of mystery among Haitians. A mystery, that of the strength of the bond that unites beings to each other, that Twilight famous, without ever having the arrogance to fully explain it.
Twilight
Stanlay Pean
Hands free
204 pages