Operation “Canadian Literature” continues apace, and I have now added a Francophone novel to my growing list of Canadian masterpieces.
In spite of a clumsy translation into English, it’s clear from the start that Querelle of Roberval is a product of a different culture than the other Canadian novels I read. I’m sure that this impression would have been even stronger if I read Querelle with the Quebecois slang of the original instead of the prissy language of alarmed middle-aged accountants with which the translator mysteriously endowed its working-class characters. I also intuit that it’s a novel with a significant melodic component where it matters how things sound, and the translation erases that.
Still, even diluted by translation, Querelle is a punch-in-the-gut kind of novel that narrates the slow dying-out and posthumous defilement of the working-class Quebecois culture. Lambert is a talented writer who anticipates every narrative a reader’s mind can compose to weasel out of seeing the truth and unleashes a parody of that narrative at the exact same moment it might arise in the reader’s head. When he does that, it creates a very intimate experience for the reader of grappling with the writer throughout the book. You need high, high skill to write like this.
Unlike many writers who feel guilty for their “privilege” and slobber over industrial workers in embarrassing ways, Lambert wants nothing to do with that kind of virtue -signaling and is brutally honest about the moral catastrophe of his worker characters:
They had found their own way of being. No one wanted them, no business, no bank, no creditor, no insurance company, and suddenly in the midst of their pain and suffering they discovered a gentle, welcoming face, a new start and a destiny. They were not just debris adrift in a filthy, toxic river, they were going to sweep away entire houses. Nothing had any importance anymore, other than to commit evil, to sow it and cultivate it. This afternoon they made a vow to commit themselves to the evangelization of the worst. Of course they would doubtless end up dead or before the courts, but their lives were no longer worth much, certainly not the bother of being defended. They possessed only a small reserve of vitality and would do all they could to expend it on futile and costly causes.
Lambert’s novel has some remarkable similarities with the anti-neoliberal novels in Spanish that I analyze in my new book. The same moral catastrophe of the working classes, the same presence of dead or discarded children, the same absence of solidarity, a female character who destroys children. An article analyzing the similarities between Layla Martínez’s Carcoma and Lambert’s Querelle is begging to be written. Or an edited volume on Quebecois and Spanish literature of anti-neoliberalism. Just bypassing the Anglo world completely. If I didn’t have a trillion other projects, I’d do it.
I have to warn the people who don’t know much about the Quebecois culture is that the book is very NSFW. I was listening to it while resting in the lounge deep in the recesses of my lab. Parts of the book are very hardcore gay porn, and I saw horrified lab workers scatter around in fear whenever I’d proceed to the lounge with my Kindle.
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