Does giving up money fulfill the search for oneself? This is the original path taken by Louis-Daniel Godin in a story that touches the heart.
When you open The Report Is Good, the first chapter is numbered 0—like Julie Masse’s C’est Zero, which you heard everywhere when the narrator was a kid.
This zero is not trivial. It testifies to the beginnings of fundamental questions: “How much is zero?” “. There will be many more, as the numbering of the following chapters shows: five chapters 20 will follow each other, but there will also be 141, 17,500 or even 2012 The numbers are the backbone of the novel.
But is it really a novel? It stars Louis-Daniel Godin-Ouimet, who has all the traits of the author, including the first thing that catches your eye: he’s an adopted child.
“Five days,” he says. So basically at birth, which confuses the cards. Finally, year after year (why the restriction, since she’s been there almost forever? the narrator asks), his adoptive mother emphasizes his entry into the family as if his life had begun that day.
However, was no money paid for his arrival? Does that mean he owes his mother anything?
This is all the more the case as working as a cashier at IGA often lacks money, then breaks up, then meets a depressed and drinking Marcel and dreams of a jackpot and nice jewellery. We’re even keeping the $20 that little Louis-Daniel once got as a gift. He doesn’t understand that the money that was kept safe in his mother’s pocket has disappeared.
It’s interesting to measure how much our relationship with money shapes our daily lives. Godin mixes in a search for identity in which an adult now making a very good living wants to understand where the author is from.
Another possible life
The author therefore observes his character from a distance; he himself insists on this discrepancy: what is the truth about what he tells? Above all, adoption is inseparable from a sense of alienation; it implies that another life would have been possible for him.
His confessions are therefore marked by hesitation. “We can still escape,” he writes at the beginning of a chapter about a very special love story. Yet he will submerge, “unravel and reassemble” it, as he does so many other moments of his existence.
And you have to see Godin’s skill with the stitches! His sentences are long and monotonous, but he doesn’t miss a single one. So we quickly get used to the special breath of the story that leads us to the Uniprix and the set of “The Golden Egg Chicken”, to loan and scholarship applications and the writing of a thesis …
All of this is rich in intelligence, sensitivity and splendor! To be read without reservation, for our greatest benefit.