Daniel Grenier no longer has the same faith in fiction as he once did, but he’s not quite ready to turn his back on it if we’re to trust Heroines and Tombs, a novel that throbs to the rhythm of its playful borrowings from Brazilian literature.
Posted at 7:00 am
“Something in me loses faith in what fiction has given itself the right to do,” says Daniel Grenier, a funny line for someone who has just published a novel.
But it turns out that with heroines and tombs, the author has built an authentic adventure novel that uses all sources of the genre effectively. Rather than stifling its dynamism, the many considerations this book muses on – on cultural appropriation, but more generally on the responsibility that lies with the one who tells the other – have become the driving force behind a teeming fresco that questions the prejudices inherent in every storytelling process.
For several years I have heard several great writers talk about the sovereignty of the writer who not only has the right but also the duty to put himself in the shoes of others and I think that is an argument full of blind spots.
Daniel Grenier, author
Storytelling means making decisions, emphasizing certain things and not others. And for Daniel Grenier, it is essential to be aware of the impact that these decisions will have once they are over.
“I don’t feel at all like there’s a moment in the story that censors me,” he says. For the first time in 50, 60 years, we’re asking ourselves genuine, stimulating, and fruitful questions about art and literature that challenge the truths we thought were universal. »
joy intact
These questions run through the author’s entire sixth book of Despite It All We Laugh at Saint-Henri, a tale of cannibalism and lies fueled by his affection for South American literature.
Journalist Alexandra Pearson, who was last crossed in Françoise, her previous novel, leaves Brazil to investigate the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of writer Ambrose Bierce.
A main plot that quickly becomes an opportunity for Daniel Grenier to multiply the winks and borrowings, in particular from the work of Ernesto Sábato, as well as from the cannibal movement, the founding artistic movement of Brazilian modernism. His delight in playing with the sources of fiction, weaving together historical and mythical fact, is evidently intact.
“I still love what the novel allows for, he admits, in terms of its relationship to the world and the knowledge specific to it. So I see this book as a torn work that shows my tension, where I am in my questioning in terms of truth, invention, objectivity. »
Inevitable vampirism
Daniel Grenier is a prolific translator of many works, including that of Plains Cree writer Dawn Dumont, and the author of a journal of his reading of works written by women (Les constellées). Daniel Grenier is an ally, although he doesn’t commit himself as an example of perfection.
The warnings that his Ambrose Bierce, in Heroines and Tombs, directs at Oswald de Andrade, mastermind of the cannibalistic movement, about the limits of his fascination with indigenous cultures are somehow offered to himself by the author.
A lot of artists saw themselves as big progressives in their day, for example when they were interested in African art, and today we see it in a different light.
Daniel Grenier, author
The BQ reprint of his 2015 novel The Longest Year, scheduled for August, was also an opportunity for him to touch up the text a bit. Despite his noble intentions, he couldn’t quite resist the pose of the white savior in his way of portraying native and black characters.
“But by asking myself all these questions, I’m not ridding myself of a form of vampirism that’s on the order of any form of writing,” he clarifies. When one writes, one cannot entirely escape from a form of exploiting the other, and above all from a form of exploiting oneself. »
Playing together
Since the publication of Françoise last (2018), Daniel Grenier has often been asked what became of the woman in the title, and the book’s resolution leaves many threads taut. That readers think of a character’s fate on paper as if they were a real person is undoubtedly a testament to the greatest power of fiction.
Insofar as true love does not take anything for granted, Heroines and Tombs is therefore perhaps less the book of a “tearing apart”, as Daniel Grenier puts it, than one of a renewal of the vows that bind it to the art of the novel, albeit on new bases.
“Because we’re asking ourselves these questions about characters, about what’s true and what’s made up, we keep reading fiction,” he notes. And for those reasons, the game is worth the candle. Playing together is the most fun. »
heroines and graves
Daniel Grenier
heliotrope
384 pages