On 15 March 1977, with his wife's consent, celebrated writer and former terrorist Hubert Aquin blew his brains out on the grounds of a Montreal convent school. Shocked by this self-murder, a filmmaker friend feels compelled to understand why Aquin killed himself - and discovers, at the heart of the tragedy, an unforgettable love story. A "documentary fiction" - a category which includes In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song - HA! is a seminal work that reinvents the audio-visual revolution of the last century. Interweaving photographs, documents, and images with testimony from Aquin's friends and contemporaries, Aquin himself, and the writers and artists who influenced him, this intriguing novel takes the reader on a Joycean tour of a metropolis in the midst of political and cultural turmoil.
HA!: A Self-Murder Mystery (Self-Murder Mysteries)
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When the great Quebecois novelist Hubert Aquin shot himself in the grounds of a suburban convent, he could not have imagined that his death would precipitate a vast documentary fiction, written en anglais by a friend, un anglais no less. HA! is just that, an 800-odd page account of Aquin's death and times, compiled by his sometime collaborator, filmmaker Gordon Sheppard. Aquin was one of the great cultural figures of the Quiet Revolution, and English Canada has never had anything like him: a novelist/mystic/critic/terrorist/dandy/martyr to call its own. By comparison, his contemporary Pierre Trudeau looks like a dowdy provincial dimwit. In HA!, Sheppard attempts to give us the measure of the man and his works, and to argue that Aquin's suicide was his greatest artistic accomplishment.
HA! is a hybrid leviathan, part postmodern fiction, part CBC docudrama, part Royal Commission Report. Sheppard calls the book a montage, and stuffs it with all manner of things--paintings by the Old Masters, extended quotations from the Western canon, photographs, postcards, letters, newspaper clippings, a dreadful comic pastiche of Shakespeare, souvenirs of Sheppard's film Eliza's Horoscope, song lyrics, transcribed soundscapes, and the like, all supplied in the name of "context" and the creation of a "multi-media environment." HA! appears to have been built rather than written; it takes its cue from McLuhan's Mechanical Bride, but now she has run to promiscuity and fat.
The result is a mixed success. The interviews with Aquin's circle--his widow and his ex-wife, his friends, lovers, admirers, and professional contacts--are the most consistently interesting element of the book, and they benefit from the inclusion of other documentary materials. Anyone with an interest in Aquin, his works, Quebec politics, or the French language in Canada will find much to ponder here. Many of Sheppard's more extravagant flourishes, however, are naïve and self-indulgent; the more that Gordon Sheppard the character intrudes into HA!, the more irritating his book becomes. HA! raises more issues than can be addressed in a brief review. It is a paradox of a text: theoretically challenging but aesthetically unsatisfying, a monument to Quebec erected in English, an immense film in the form of an immense book, an experimental work that is profoundly conventional in its formal tactics. It may well be remembered as the fanfare that inaugurated the decadent phase of Canadian postmodernism. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
"HA! is a harrowing investigation of some of the most profound and troubling aspects of the human condition... a brave and important work that richly deserves our attention and discussion." Quill and Quire
"HA! is a truly incredible book. You are unlikely to find many that will even come close to it." Geeta Nadkarmi, Between the Pages
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HUBERT AQUIN: I am the broken symbol of the Quebec revolution, but also its disordered reflection and its suicidal incarnation. Read the first page
Front Cover | Excerpt | Back Cover
HUBERT AQUIN: I am the broken symbol of the Quebec revolution, but also its disordered reflection and its suicidal incarnation. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews
Most helpful customer reviews
Format:Hardcover
This remarkable work of fiction/biography/rapportage and montage is both vastly entertaining and deeply disturbing. Certainly, it is the most detailed portrait of the emotional and cultural logic of a suicide ever written. It is also a window onto the landscape of Quebec society in the 60s and 70s. All this is offered in the most accessible and playful form with multimedia annotations, and cultural excursions that carry the reader along through circle after circle in this intimate journey. Anyone who loves literature, is fascinated by human motivations, or simply wants to know more about a unique soul in its place and time, will be richly rewarded.
Format:Hardcover
This is simply the most unique and impressive book I have ever come across. It weighs in at a whopping 1.6 Kg or 3 1/2lbs. After 6 straight days of reading I feel educated, voyeuristic, saddened and have a deeper sense of insight into Quebec History and Aquin's literary influences. The book, 26 years in the making, is the story of Hubert Aquin's life and ultimate death by his own 'words'. Sheppard explicitly depicts Aquin's life and death as a work of art with respect to a long tradition of such in literature and film. Through quotes, musical interludes and interviews Aquin's last violent act was a work of art by a shattered man. His life, full of tragedy (self-inflicted or otherwise), love and loss, begat several classics in Quebec Literature, namely Prochain Episode. Sheppard's book surely merits a wide audience as does the work of Aquin. I urge you to consider reading this book. Excellent value for the $$. Do pick up and read a copy... it is like jumping off a floating dock in the middle of a familiar lake of your childhood memories. You can swim safely near the tether and enjoy the security that its proximity provides, or risk wading farther away and try to touch the bottom to see how deep you can go. Metaphors aside, it is better to use Sheppard's own words from his 1969 essay, Violence and the French Canadian Male, an early critique of Aquin's first two novels, "We all must try to understand how to be worthy of it." *
* Canada: A Guide to the Peaceable Kingdom, ed. William Kilbourn. p.192.
Format:Hardcover
This is simply the most unique and impressive book I have ever come across. It weighs in at a whopping 1.6 Kg or 3 1/2lbs. After 6 straight days of reading I feel educated, voyeuristic, saddened and have a deeper sense of insight into Quebec History and Aquin's literary influences. The book, 26 years in the making, is the story of Hubert Aquin's life and ultimate death by his own 'words'. Sheppard explicitly depicts Aquin's life and death as a work of art with respect to a long tradition of such in literature and film. Through quotes, musical interludes and interviews Aquin's last violent act was a work of art by a shattered man. His life, full of tragedy (self-inflicted or otherwise), love and loss, begat several classics in Quebec Literature, namely Prochain Episode. Sheppard's book surely merits a wide audience as does the work of Aquin. I urge you to consider reading this book. Excellent value for the $$. Do pick up and read a copy... it is like jumping off a floating dock in the middle of a familiar lake of your childhood memories. You can swim safely near the tether and enjoy the security that its proximity provides, or risk wading farther away and try to touch the bottom to see how deep you can go. Metaphors aside, it is better to use Sheppard's own words from his 1969 essay, Violence and the French Canadian Male, an early critique of Aquin's first two novels, "We all must try to understand how to be worthy of it." *
* Canada: A Guide to the Peaceable Kingdom, ed. William Kilbourn. p.192.
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