Kevin Lambert's Querelle of Roberval is an exploration of class struggle and politics — read an excerpt now
The novel is a finalist for the $60,000 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize
Kevin Lambert's Querelle of Roberval is a novel set in Quebec involving a young person named Querelle who moves to the northern lumber town of Roberval and sets off a chain of events involving sex, passion and violence. Roberval is in the middle of a millworkers' strike and Querelle's carnal involvement with some of the young men in the small town fuels tensions among all involved.
It is one of five books shortlisted for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Prize for Fiction. The $60,000 award recognizes the best novel or short story collection published in Canada. The winner will be announced on Nov. 2, 2022.
"All of my books start from a political question. Querelle of Roberval is set in Quebec. It is about the landscapes and the geographies where I grew up. It's a place where many people work for these large multinational companies that exploit the local resources. It gives a weird atmosphere and structure because you never see the faceless bosses of these companies but everybody works for them," Lambert told CBC Books in an interview.
"I was interested in figuring out how one might fight against these structures — who is the enemy? The characters in the book go on strike to improve their working conditions. They think that their enemy is with their immediate boss. But they soon discover that it's much broader than this — the enemy is our social structures."
Lambert is a writer from Quebec. He is also the author of the novel You Will Love What You Have Killed. Querelle of Roberval was translated into English by Donald Winkler.
You can read an excerpt from Querelle of Roberval below.
Querelle. The name is circulating, is making the rounds, is being passed back and forth under one's breath in an aisle at Rossy, is being barked out audibly between two hot chickens at the Ski-Doo rest stop, no one's ever seen the boy but the picture painted is that of a character out of one of those sadistic, frightening stories our cousins tell in summer under the tent.
LISTEN | Kevin Lambert on bringing Querelle of Roberval to an English audience:
Querelle is Roberval's bogeyman, people place bets on his age — sometimes 25, sometimes 50— on the colour of his skin and hair, brown, green, black, on the shape of his mouth and eyes. Like that evil creature, he spirits away adolescents, corrupts them, carves them up, devours them; like the fabled monster, no one knows where he comes from: from Montreal, from the Mafia or from Saudi Arabia, but one thing is certain: he lives in a cave, often roams the beaches, and works side by side with your godchild's girlfriend. People talk about this troublemaker, legends abound as to his combats and his special friendships. The youths at the student dorm and the Saint-Félicien college revere this striking public enemy, they romance the nights spent in his apartment, laud his impressive member and the words he pours into their ears while he's spearing them — to such-and-such an ugly duckling he'll have professed his love, to a student gymnast he'll have said he has "the most beautiful ass ever," a so-so player on the Roberval Sabres will have spent three days in his apartment as his boy toy.
A tenacious rumour of unknown origins contends that it's Querelle who kidnapped little Michaël Bolduc, missing since November, in order to tie him up in his closet and subject him to an array of sexual torments. This story is on people's lips all around the Lac, it's been published in the local papers and talked about on the radio in short dispatches that are even shorter on detail: nothing is known except that the boy never returned from his first day at the college in Alma. No peddler of this scabrous news, no hawker of this charming abductor's vagaries is intent on enlightenment, but only on playing the fabulist: at every twist in the tale a new layer is applied to the pornographic narrative, there is a heightening of alarm and a raising of the voice, and a few more blooms are added to the bouquet of blood-soaked images.
The truth concerning the Michaël Bolduc affair is to be found far from the journalists and nearer to the hairdressers' armchairs, to the shopping centre restaurants where it's said that Michaël, of his own free will, fled his large family and his hippieish parents — two doctors who have palped the glands of half of Lac Saint-Jean's population — so free-spirited and close to their children; he's the reject of a well-known tribe in the region, and he's branded with that. Oh! You're Chantal's son, your father saved my life! They say that Michaël didn't like his family, and when he was in crisis, when his parents wouldn't let him out of the house and were deaf to his theatrics, he said right out that he hated them. Everyone knows that Michaël wanted to free himself from his father and mother's onerous expectations, the good grades they wanted to see on his report card, the educational program in which they had enrolled him, the part-time job he had to find to pay for his board even if they were as rich as Croesus.
LISTEN | Kevin Lambert reflects on his literary success:
Since the Michaël Bolduc affair, Roberval parents are afraid their defiant adolescent is going to disappear, to run off and lose himself in foul acrobatics in the arms of a beautiful pervert. Going to the grocery store, walking in the mall, Querelle is subject to the hostile glares of the district's progenitors. Mistaking these glances for desire, he imagines that they are all invitations to rendezvous in the toilets. Or perhaps he's not mistaken and there is, in the eyes of those fathers who believe their offspring are being threatened by a predator's lust, a secret desire to drink from the same spring.
Excerpted from Querelle of Roberval by Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler. First published as Querelle de Roberval © Héliotrope, 2018. Translation copyright © Donald Winkler, 2022. Excerpted with permission by Biblioasis. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
