Writer Simon Roy tells me about a rather sadistic scientific experiment, that of Curt Richter in the 1950s, in which a rat was dunked in a jug of water to watch it swim until it drowned. The rat struggled for about 15 minutes before giving up. But if we got him out of the water after 15 minutes, swam him off, calmed him down and then put him back in the water, he could fight…for 60 hours.
Posted at 7:15am
Hope, which can be the cruellest thing in the world, is essential to the will to live even when condemned. In September 2021, for the publication of his novel Done by another, I thought our interview would be the last because Simon was suffering from an aggressive brain tumor for which he had undergone surgery. Well no. Simon returns with a new book, Ma fin du monde, his fourth, written in a hurry because the cancer has also returned and this time it is no longer possible to operate.
“I surprise myself,” he said. Every book is basically the last. I wasn’t even supposed to speak to you because the predictions were that I should be dead. I work with projects. If I hadn’t had plans, I would have let myself sink. »
The story of Richter’s rat comes from his wife Marianne Marquis-Gravel’s book, the first she will publish with Leméac this fall, which chronicles what the two have been through since the fatal diagnosis. This outing is one of the most important dates in Simon’s personal calendar, which, like in the Tom Thumb story, places stones in the future. Not only to find his way back, but to follow him.
In Ma fin du monde, Simon Roy considers it a privilege to be able to organize his death, unlike those who die suddenly without ever seeing anything coming.
“I live in a frightening reality, but so beautiful. I swear I’ve never been happier than I have been in the past 15 months. The thought of my death gives me an incredible life boost. I’m in a state of gratitude. » But he admits there’s also a dark side to thinking about what he won’t live with his two children, aged 16 and 20, what Marianne will live without him and probably with someone else. They are so in love, he tells me, that he would have been willing to embark on another child’s adventure.
This isn’t the first time Simon Roy has surprised and disturbed me, I must add. I’ve been at Kubrick since his first novel, My Red Life, in which he combined his analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s film The Shining with the personal tragedy of his mother’s suicide.
When we first met, when I saw him overcome with guilt towards the one who gave him life, I said to him, “But Simon, you are the child in this dynamic. You are not responsible. His misty gaze pierced me, I remember it like it was yesterday.
“Boredom got me into writing,” he said in 2014. Boredom and Tragedy. It may be the only book I will ever write in my life. At the limit, I almost wish…”
Simon Roy is down to his fourth book and I don’t think he’s bored at the moment.
In My Red Life Kubrick he spoke of his “macabre genealogy”, of his mother’s “soul metastases” and of the fact that a love of life cannot be injected into the hospital. Between a mythomaniac father and a mother with mental health issues, he always felt in danger, like the little boy at the Overlook Hotel in The Shining. “Some do not hesitate to invest fortunes in long-term therapies,” he wrote. For my part, I’m awkwardly trying to convince myself that it’s possible to win the fight, defeat the minotaur hiding in the heart of the labyrinth, even going so far as to spit in death’s eye. »
I don’t have an esoteric mind, but sometimes I wonder if a family rift can permeate a flaw into the body of its offspring. He himself, a very rational type, sees omens in his early writings.
The labyrinth, I’m in the middle with my illness and I’m trying to find the way. I think I find it through art, through projects, through love.
Simon Roy
Simon Roy has several last minute meetings planned which are so many miracles to him that they come in time. Like Nick Cave’s recent show, who dedicated a song to him. He wants to see the shows of Sigur Rós, Julien Clerc, Charlebois, take advantage of the publication of his book and go to the premiere of Marianne, also organize regular meetings with friends, some of whom he hasn’t seen in decades.
fear and hope
In My End of the World, true to his style of fragments clashing seemingly unrelated themes – something he borrowed from The Shining author Stephen King – he mixes the story of Orson Welles’ famous 1938 radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, the urban legend of a general panic in the United States over the fake alien invasion, his uncle’s healing gifts, the experiences of those who lived the afterlife, and this incredible opportunity: the child of the doctor who dying medical care will take care of him when the time comes for Simon to have the same cancer as him, in the same part of the brain, which makes up the final and most poignant chapter of the book.
The driving force behind it? “Fear,” he replies. And of course hope.
Death awaits us all, but I feel like people too close to knowing it, like Simon, live in a hyper-realistic parallel reality and the sane live in a fiction. We may even live in fiction until books wake us up – we must not forget that Simon Roy was a literature teacher much appreciated by CEGEP students.
A few weeks ago Simon Roy invited me and my boyfriend to a chalet in Charlevoix for a weekend with him and Marianne and other friends. This is part of the appointments he organizes; he even planned his last meal with relatives. “And I treat myself to an ostie of a good bottle of wine,” he laughs. I deal with my death. That’s the positive side. The negative side is that I wish so badly that it would continue. Jean Ferrat’s song C’est beau la vie, it looks like I wrote it. »
Simon Roy forces me to write that this is not our last conversation. It also forces me to hope for that meeting in Charlevoix. “We’re going to have fun,” he told me, as if to reassure me, when it was he who had a gun to his head. But his goal is very clear: “I don’t want people to be relieved by my death. I want people to miss me and miss me. »
my end of the world
Simon Roy
lot of freedom
144 pages