“Asbestos”, by Sébastien Dulude, La Peuplade, 214 p., €20.
Selected for the Literary Prize
“The World” 2024
A friendship like a cabin. A place to be yourself: a 10-year-old boy, who reads Tintin on the chain, plays at scaring himself by recording the world’s dramas in a “disaster notebook” and rejoices when he has enough to buy “cherry gums” (we are in Quebec). Who finds himself very embarrassed when a pornographic magazine falls into his hands for the first time, but guesses the gestures of sexual awakening in the half-sleep of an afternoon in the crushing heat.
Perched in their pine tree, during the summer of 1986, Steve, the narrator ofAsbestos, first novel by Sébastien Dulude, and Charlélie, known as “Little Poulin”son “inseparable”escape the already lax supervision of adults. The first seeks to escape the violence of his father and the codes of a virility that is as toxic as the asbestos that the city of Thetford Mines lives and dies of. This virility that his father, “miner-trucker”wants to instill in him at all costs. The joyful tranquility that reigns in the family of “little Poulin” is an additional reason to love him.
The summer days that the two boys spend running between the “ dompes » (slag heaps) and their shelter in the trees seem to be able to last forever. This impression is reinforced by Steve’s account of it throughout the first part of the novel, in an imperfect tense that seems like eternity and in a succession of temporal back-and-forths over the two years that this miraculous friendship lasted. This constant movement of the text seeks to restore all the dimensions of their bond, to revive in a vibrant language each sensation experienced together or while waiting to meet again, once the morning cornflakes have been swallowed. Textures, smells, sounds, temperatures, tastes… Everything must be summoned, as if to push back the moment of arriving at August 31, 1986, the day when the cabin is dismantled and their friendship experiences an explosion stronger than the one that, every day, at 4 p.m., resounds from the mine.
Dichotomy
Five years later, in the summer of 1991, Steve’s story picks up, in the present tense, to report another detonation. Asbestos is built in the contrast between these two parts, separated by a lunar black and white photo of “dompes”.
Quebecer Sébastien Dulude, a poet and publisher born in 1976 and raised in Thetford Mines, seems to have made dichotomy the very principle of his novel, which is based on the opposition between the aridity of the mining landscapes and the sylvan beauty of the surroundings, between the gentleness of the bond that the children have formed and the violence in which Steve is immersed (“ The mine is the violence on some parents, then the violence on some children; the mine is the isolation of children, and isolation is boredom, and boredom is the violence that took my friend away from me. And violence is my new friend.”rehashes the angry 15-year-old Steve from the second part). Between the precision of what is restored and the chasms covered by the ellipses of the text. Between the brutality of the social reality described in filigree, with the announced closure of the mines and the imminent disappearance of this working-class world, and the sensitivity of the child’s view of things. These opposing tensions nourish the writing of Sébastien Dulude and this first novel with its poignant beauty on childhood memories, what they do to us and what we do with them.
