In recent years, I read less, because of social networks that demolish the ability to concentrate. Before, I was an avid reader, a devourer of essays. I decided to get back to it. To give me a discipline, but also because literature is a probe into worlds that take us out of ourselves. It is a selfish, intoxicating pleasure. We are alone in front of the book, but thousands to appreciate the same thing, to share common references.
My recovery program leaves nothing to chance. Certainly, exciting essays and foreign novels creep into my pile. But I undertook to update myself in literature from here. I read contemporary novels with delight.
Quebec society is undergoing profound changes in recent years. To understand it, to grasp its thrills, its undercurrents, culture is always one step ahead of the media and the experts.
She captures the subterranean movements, the quiverings that will become fractures. Sometimes it’s the song, or the cinema that sets the tone. At the moment, Quebec literature is fertile. She is a seismographer of the time. It’s crazy what we learn about us, in a thousand ways, with thick words, scintillating sentences, stories with a cleaver. I can’t believe that a few years ago, I tried in vain to convince a media sociologist to read current novels from here, he who prided himself on interpreting the moods of Quebec…
Things are happening in our literature. It has little to envy to those elsewhere. All styles are practiced, it is anything but flat. In its diversity, its rants, its sensitive stories, its wild quests, its painful introspections, it paints an accurate portrait of contemporary Quebec. A funny, worried, rich Quebec, which talks badly, or else, which questions the place of the individual in the world, which depresses, which sometimes finds solutions. Our novels dive deep into our collective soul. Shades of gray are more important here than the black and white of high-pitched media commentary.
Thus, some of the most divisive fractures in Quebec today concern immigration, the way we welcome newcomers, their influence on society. But them, how do they perceive their integration process? Caroline Dawson in Where I landAlain Farah, with A thousand secrets, a thousand dangersMauricio Segura, in Viral, approach the question from the inside and provide lucid, sometimes uncomfortable answers. We realize by reading them that the Quebec of tomorrow is already in the making, despite the divisive discourse surrounding it.
Quebec literature is also the speaking of the First Nations, with Michel Jean and Joséphine Bacon in the lead, followed by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui, Naomi Fontaine. To read them is to never again be able to make them invisible.
We rediscovered our geography with the pandemic? For several years, the Quebec novel has extended its territory well beyond Montreal. It has become decentralised, regionalised, more than our TV which is still too often urban, a question of costs. Samuel Archibald (Arvida)Genevieve Pettersen (The Goddess of Fireflies) talk about Saguenay, William S. Messier drives on the roads of Estrie lined with roadkillsLouis Hamelin takes us to Abitibi, when he does not extend his territory to the States with the fabulous The twilights of the Yellowstone.
Our authors can be subversive in their writing (Alexandre Soublière, Patrick Senécal, David Goudreault), or engaged, like Biz. I like their caustic way of confronting the question of Power, all the powers, the influences. One thinks of the novels of Hugo Meunier and Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard, and also of the work of essayists with such an intimate and personal tone by Mathieu Bélisle, Catherine Dorion or Marilyse Hamelin that it almost joins the fiction.
Ill-being, the suffering but sometimes funny Ego, obviously haunts the current novel. Marie-Pierre Duval (In the Land of Quiet Despair) and Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette have not moved their readers for nothing. They are part of a vast movement of authors who speak, through their personal states, of society. Let’s not forget Éric Plamondon who constructs an original, erudite and joyful work, Marie-Ève Thuot and her astonishing choral novel The trajectory of confetti, Simon Boulerice who makes the marginalized appear, Suzanne Myre, a special case. And I could go on for a long time.
In short, when the news of the day discourages me, I run to the library, and I worry less. Because apart from the catastrophic messages of the media, links are created, meaning emerges, which the authors capture, sensitive. All is not rosy in our novels. We are poked, but resilient. The collective image that emerges gives strength to face an often dark reality. Come and see Quebec authors at the Salon du livre over the next few days. You don’t know it, but they are your best friends.