You Will Love What You Have Killed
CBC Books | | Posted: August 31, 2020 7:03 PM | Last Updated: September 27, 2021
Kevin Lambert, translated by Donald Winkler
Faldistoire's grandfather thinks he's a ghost. Sylvie's mother reads tarot and summons stormclouds to mete her witch's justice. Behind his Dad of the Year demeanour, Sébastien's father hides dark designs. It's Croustine's grandfather who makes the boy a pair of slippers from the dead family dog, but it's his father, the cannily-named Kevin Lambert, who always seems to be nearby when tragedy strikes, and in the cemetery, under the baleful eyes of toads, small graves are dug one after the other: Chicoutimi, Quebec, is a dangerous place for children. But these young victims of rape, arbitrary violence, and senseless murder keep coming back from the dead. They return to school, explore their sexualities, keep tabs on grown-up sins — and plot their apocalyptic retribution.
Surreal and darkly comic, this debut novel by Kevin Lambert, one of the most celebrated and controversial writers to come out of Quebec in recent memory, takes the adult world to task — and then takes revenge. (From Biblioasis)
Kevin Lambert is a writer from Quebec. You Will Love What You Have Killed is his first novel, and the first to be translated into English. He is also the author of the novel Querelle de Roberval.
Donald Winkler is a filmmaker and translator from Montreal. He won the Governor General's Literary Award for French-to-English translation for The Lyric Generation: The Life and Times of the Baby-Boomers by François Ricard, Partitia for Glenn Gould by Georges Leroux and The Major Verbs by Pierre Nepveu. Two books translated by him have been finalists for the Scotiabank Giller Prize: A Secret Between Us by Daniel Poliquin in 2007 and Arvida by Samuel Archibald in 2015.
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