Despite her shyness, she made important relationships during her stay, especially with Marwan, a comrade from the Gaza Strip. Since his master’s thesis focused on the Intifada, the uprising of young Palestinians, it was natural for him to talk to this man whose area of interest was economics. However, one day he was seen leaving his apartment accompanied by men dressed in black.
Who was he after all? This is the question posed in Claudine Bourbonnais’ book “Fate is Others.” Published by Quebec America, in Collection III, whose aim is to tell a true story, even if that means spicing it up with a dash of fiction. Based on this mystery, it paints a portrait of an era, a region that weighs the weight of history, but also that of a woman at a crossroads.
In fact, the moment when she will become a television journalist for Radio-Canada has not yet arrived. We have to wait a few pages until the presenter of the Téléjournal weekend sees her calling take shape. While she is in Cairo to better express herself in the Arabic language, we meet her one evening in the company of two journalists, a German and an American, who know the Middle East inside out.
“I envied her, I admired her, I wanted to be like her,” wrote the author of the novel “Métis Beach” three decades after that crucial encounter. The weight of others upon one’s own fate could not find a more sensible example. “The title says it, we form the sum of the encounters we have in our lives. When I was nine, there was the substitute teacher and later the one who explained to me the war in Lebanon, his country of origin,” said Claudine Bourbonnais in a telephone interview with Le Progrès.
Figuring out what your job will be is one thing, but you still need to give yourself the tools to access it. The young woman has always struggled with a pronounced, somewhat paralyzing shyness. Even among his roommates in England, it wasn’t his nature to attract attention. “It made me unhappy to be so shy, but I healed myself by putting myself in situations where I had no choice but to take my place,” she emphasizes.
What came to mind more spontaneously was observing what was happening around her. The book thus evokes the atmosphere that permeated the Thatcher years. While she and her comrades speculated about Marwan’s fate, interest rates and unemployment were high. Career prospects depended on social background. To rise, you had to be born good, which caused more and more resentment.
“It was a time of dark optimism. There was, for example, the fear of AIDS, but also rapid changes, as shown by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the release of Nelson Mandela and the end of apartheid in South Africa. We had hope for a better world, an illusion that was shattered by what Marwan portrays in the book, as were 9/11 and the rise of Islamism,” describes Claudine Bourbonnais.
What could have looked like an analytical text in less experienced hands consistently follows the form of the novel and is all the better for it. There are twists, a fair amount of self-deprecation and even a touch of romance. We travel from England to Cairo, then to Gaza and Quebec, without ever losing sight of the fact that the narrator is a real person, haunted by doubts and sometimes guilt, capable of empathy and happy with her husband , however, fate will play a dirty trick.
“Writing to myself requires a certain amount of introspection so that the text corresponds to who we are. Since my niche is novels, I wouldn’t have done it on my own, but I accepted an invitation from the publisher. However, I allowed myself to bring together different characters and at the same time immerse the reader in part of the mystery about Marwan that we discover at the end of the book. Ultimately, I would say 80% of the content is true,” says Claudine Bourbonnais.