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Hubert Aquin was, briefly, Quebec's great warrior-intellectual. His life was short and intense: between the late '50s and his suicide in 1977 he wore the hats of novelist, essayist, terrorist agitator, politician, prisoner, film producer, literary editor, and stockbroker.
Next Episode, Aquin's first novel, is a brilliant offshoot of its author's early political career. Written while Aquin was being held at a Montreal psychiatric hospital, pending trial for the possession of a stolen automobile and an automatic firearm,
Next Episode is narrated by a young revolutionary, an Aquin double who's also imprisoned in a psychiatric institution. In an attempt to while away the hours, the narrator begins writing a kind of political thriller concerning a Québécois terrorist who, while abroad in Switzerland, unexpectedly rediscovers his long-lost lover, K., a sort of eternal-feminine figure and personification of the nation of Quebec. K. instructs the narrator to murder one H. de Heutz, a spy-banker-historian-aristocrat who has apparently been sending information about radical Québécois bank accounts to the RCMP. The convoluted chase that ensues is a Kafkaesque exercise in futility, in which the twinned agents pursue one another through a symbol-strewn landscape of cultural memory.
Two factors are likely to keep Next Episode from ever gaining a wide readership in English Canada. Aquin's French is too rich and lyrical to translate well; the ever-capable Sheila Fischman has produced a workable version of the text, but the florid, romantic prose of Next Episode will always sound forced in English. Furthermore, this is a book of great political and cultural specificity. Readers who have never lived in Quebec or are unfamiliar with its history will likely find the most crucial elements of the novel incomprehensible. Many readers will be able to enjoy the novel's acute deconstruction of the political thriller, but Next Episode's true fire lies in its nationalist fervour. --Jack Illingworth
Canada Reads panelist Justin Trudeau
Amazing.
--This text refers to the
Audio CD
edition.
