“Asbestos” by Sébastien Dulude, stock slag heaps – Libération

2024-08-23 13:45:00

Livres de Libé notebookdossier

The Canadian poet wrote a first novel about his childhood in the city of Thetford Mines, called “the city of white gold”.

Perhaps books are like people: the ones that challenge us first often become our favorites. From memory, the first pages ofasbestos, The first novel by a Quebecer born in Montreal in 1976, it seems difficult, it has chaos for us – a well-known feeling, when a word does not have the indulgence that escapes, developing its choreography when expected to answer silly fissa questions like “Where are we? Who is speaking?”, etc. It will take some time, no doubt, to get in here, and it is a very good sign because that is the time it takes to get used to a new voice – especially if the voice is connected to childhood: it is an experience of l’Opponax by Monique Wittig, for example, this first distraction. No one showed their cock at the door asbestos, but a 10-year-old boy took a newspaper from him: “Between two mouthfuls of cereal, little Poulin told me that the rumor, Mr. Joly, had died last week in a road accident.”

The pastoral beauty of the area

We are in the Canadian city of Thetford Mines, long named the “city of white gold”, where 40% of the world’s asbestos is at the height of its activity – “this kind of city” summarizes one of the characters to draw this program where Sébastien Dulude himself grew up, from 6 years to 16 years. Writing this book is for him to go back there, to be there, to talk about me, work, unhappiness, dust on the calves, but with the pastoral beauty of the area. It was a matter of sight and, like turning lead into gold, everything changed soon for 9-year-old Steve Dubois, the day a new neighbor arrived in the neighborhood, “A boy of my age who has an unruly appearance” in the name of little Poulin. Together, they would spend the summer on high slag heaps and keep busy by cutting things out of newspapers with the intention of building “album de catastrophes” (which means worse things elsewhere): earthquakes, plane crashes, shipwrecks Candidate… The first time the novel took place in 1986, the second five years later, in 1991. They are of the same length: there is roughly childhood on one hand and adolescence on the other, and a chasm between the two .

There are facts and plot, but what takes precedence, which takes you by surprise at first and then quickly overcomes, is the writing. With almost every sentence, your feeling, your image, your memory. The narrator tells how he saw it, the faces, the landscapes, and we clearly see what these stories do. “It is a bastard pine forest, a part of the forest in constant struggle and weak, a honey-red forest, always changing, which has lost ground to more chaotic flowers. The tall pine trees are calming. “ In the spring, we see daffodils, and once “I” want to take some to dry in your room. Funny idea: “mom” so it is poisonous and “Father” what “It’s a little bit, the smell of daffodils, that nobody dies ah ah ah, that’s it it must be full of ants». He is a reporter “A sensitive heart”, everything tells him, in the sense of what he perceives the smallest difference, and he is in the family of miners where it is appropriate from father to son to be single and to sink into the black hole – against the rock man this, poison, it. flower-like sweetness.

At the top of the branches, we read “The Case of the Sunflower”

In the word “Asbestos”, the reader will be able to develop certain things – Sébastien Dulude uses all the features of his metaphor: injury, protection of nature against external aggression, difficulty in removal. “Amiante” is also a friend of the ear, a lover, a lover, a lover, and we must hear this echo since the first time we follow the meeting of the two boys who draw each other and find one of them in the landmark, a tent Up in the categories we read The Word of Sunflower, You are blessed by your first porn magazine, it is universal. In a dream or not, early in the book, a hand comes out. The scene, completely dry, light and spontaneous, is not the key to it all. If it is possible to read without blinking and to live, to even look for tension and no anxiety, it is because the author seems to have written in childhood as a person writes from a country that has not really left. It is not the old man who looks back at this time.

Just published in Quebec (where “The available 4,000 copies were sold in four days” says the Canadian publisher La Peuplade) and placed on the site by getting on the press, Asbestos released almost simultaneously in France. Let’s wish him at least equal success in France: in the back-to-school cascade, he has a real gem. Also a publisher and artist, the author has three poetry collections behind him. And how, in some cases, the power of a poem, precisely, seems to penetrate between the lines like smoke and control, we do not really know about what telluric movement, to lift, move your paragraph to places height: it is a memory that is preserved. Burning smell and airy breath.

Sébastien Dulude, asbestos, La Peuplade, 224 pp., €20 (ebook: €12.99).