Le temps malhabile by Olivier Bourque

Abstract

Benameur effectively shuttles between the events leading up to Antoine’s current circumstances and his reactions to them. In addition, she convincingly blends a potent cocktail of sentiments: Antoine’s adolescent dissatisfaction with his status as his parents’ “child,” his shame at not having made his way into the working man’s world, and a more troubling sense of existentialist void. The novel changes direction when Antoine decides to travel to Montlevade, Brazil, the factory’s relocation site. Motivation is two-fold: he wants to travel and see the Brazilian factory workers who are his counterparts. But this change in direction threatens to pull the story apart. Antoine becomes far more engaged in experiencing the exotic than in investigating the world of work. To be fair to Benameur, the novel nominally accomplishes the expectations set up at the beginning: Antoine will find another kind of work that he deems meaningful, that is, writing; and he will have surpassed the minimalist ambitions of his parents in doing so. The book he is writing may eventually be related to the questions about work that the novel has raised at the beginning (Antoine will write about the French capitalist who launched the steel industry in Brazil, in part, by enslaving Brazilian indigents). The connections, however, are not clearly made: how or what he will write and with what purpose is left to the reader to guess. Least convincing of all is his affair with a young Brazilian woman who confections wildly colored outfits harkening back to French fashion of the 1950s. She becomes, quite inexplicably, his muse and model for pursuing his dream. Insurrections are most usually organized , collective actions against authority (civil rebellion and perhaps even labor protests come to mind, especially this year). I do not quibble with Benameur for having chosen to make Antoine’s insurrection “singular,” that is, solitary and perhaps even a little odd. Had I had a clearer sense of what in fact Antoine was rebelling against, I might have been better able to share his sense of satisfaction at the end of the novel. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March BOURQUE, OLIVIER. Le temps malhabile. Montréal: Triptyque, 2011. ISBN 978-2-89031705 -5. Pp. 50. $16 Can. Bourque offers a collection of—what we call with Baudelaire—poèmes en prose: thirty-eight texts identified by a date, plus two introductory texts that open each of the two parts of this small volume. However, the dates which function as headlines of the poetic entries do not offer the number of a year—they just indicate the season of the year and, thereby, create a general structure of time, especially since the entries are not laid out like the day-to-day account of a diary, but rather like occasional notes written at irregular intervals. They cover a period of roughly one and a half years. The leitmotiv of these poetic notes is the difficult relation between two human beings, i.e., a man and a woman, whose existence is overshadowed by the consciousness of mortality (mourir and la mort are recurring code words). The metaphors building on the bold and unexpected word echo the surrealistic movement that had an impact on Canada’s Francophone literature since the 1930s. Bourque’s first poetry volume, La matérialité du mouvement (2004), had also shown the influence of surrealism. It is, therefore, not surprising to find the author as a participant at a conference titled Héritage du surréalisme (2009). The poetic ego or speaking voice of Le temps malhabile applies frequent shifts 978 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 of perception. The poetic images often reflect the hermetic symbolism to which we are accustomed from surrealistic paintings—fascinating but hard to decipher. These images in Bourque’s collection are samples of pure poetry and absolute beauty—absolute in the etymological sense, i.e., absolved from the burden of everyday realism and, thereby, truly surrealistic. The author has, however, not followed blindly André Breton’s concept of écriture automatique. Despite its sometimes dreamlike imagery, Bourque’s poetry is well crafted. New effects are created by the introduction of medical terminology from the author’s professional environment . The human body...