Rien dans le ciel par Michael Delisle

Abstract

Reviewed by: Rien dans le ciel par Michael Delisle Eilene Hoft-March Delisle, Michael. Rien dans le ciel. Boréal, 2021 ISBN 978-2-7646-2653-5. Pp. 144. The eight assembled short stories of this volume begin in despair and end with a modest renewal of hope. The evenly written pieces draw their subtle dramatic force from an unpretentious prose and not entirely banal action. Each one represents the tribulations of aging: thwarted ambitions, loss of purpose, growing isolation, revised self-image—all of it unrelieved by the drama of death. The opening story is about an aging hoarder of graphic novels living in squalor in a Montreal high-rise. The building having been sold to a wealthy investor, the old man lives under orders to decamp, unable to commit himself to become the literal human sacrifice to gentrification inspired by his BD imagery. A darker tale follows in which a newly minted retiree unearths an unthinkable act in his father’s past so consistently misrepresented in family lore that it deforms the history with which he himself identifies. On the theme of misrecognized identities, a third story begins with a man reeling from a recent divorce who encounters another only just bereft of his sister. Their chance meeting begets an effortless camaraderie that endures several years. When at last the man accepts his friend’s offer of a cabin getaway to be able to write, he is stunned to encounter the cognitive dissonance of his friend’s unexamined adherence to religious dogma paired with his casual sexual comportment. The story that follows begins with two men having little in common: a temporary chauffeur and the fading Argentinian and former TV heartthrob he squires about. The two ill-matched men come to an important exchange of views on dying, aging, and being oneself, in that order. Three more stories explore relationships of characters who have caved under the weight of age and diminishing expectations: one who cheerfully and pragmatically adopts a young “niece” who will inherit his estate; another who attempts to save an immigrant from deportation with a quiet altruism that the young migrant cluelessly exploits; and a third who reunites briefly with an old flame only to experience “une peine insondable” (117) for what she has (not) become. The very last story serves as an antidote to these bitter conclusions. It opens with the narrator receiving the dis concerting news of his imminent death. He hastily liquidates his possessions, most notably all documentation of his existence, in order to leave definitively for Cambodia to live out his shortened life. The story’s delightful peripety offers a different angle on the wisdom threaded throughout the collection: that the present is all we ever have to work with. [End Page 243] Eilene Hoft-March Lawrence University (WI) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French