Daniel Grenier no longer has the same confidence in fiction as before, but is not yet ready to turn his back on it, if we are to trust Heroines and Tombs, a novel pulsating to the rhythm of his playful borrowings from Brazilian literature.
“There is something in me that is losing confidence in what fiction has given itself the right to do,” says Daniel Grenier, a funny phrase to say for someone who has just launched a novel.
But it turns out that the writer has built with Heroines and tombs an authentic adventure novel, effectively using all the springs of the genre. Rather than stifling its momentum, the numerous reflections that this book broods on – on cultural appropriation, but more broadly on the responsibility incumbent on who tells the other – have become the engine of a teeming fresco, questioning the biases inherent in any storytelling process.
To tell is to make choices, to highlight certain things rather than others. And for Daniel Grenier, it is imperative to become aware of the effect that these choices have, once put together.
“I don’t at all feel like I’m living a moment in history that censors me,” he says. For the first time in 50, 60 years, we ask ourselves real, stimulating and fruitful questions about art and literature, which upset the truths we thought were universal. »
These questions irrigate the whole of the sixth book of the author of Despite everything we laugh at Saint-Henri, a story of cannibalism and lies driven by his affection for South American literature.
Crossed in Françoise last, her previous novel, the journalist Alexandra Pearson leaves to investigate in Brazil the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of the writer Ambrose Bierce.
A main plot which quickly becomes for Daniel Grenier the opportunity to multiply the winks and borrowings from the work of Ernesto Sábato, in particular, as well as from the cannibal movement, the founding artistic current of Brazilian modernity. His pleasure in playing with the springs of fiction, in weaving together historical and fabled facts, is clearly intact.
“I still love what the novel allows, he admits, about its relationship to the world and to the knowledge that is specific to it. That’s why I see this book as a torn work, which shows my tension, where I am in my questioning in relation to truth, invention, objectivity. »
A prolific translator of numerous works, including that of Plains Cree writer Dawn Dumont, and author of a diary of his readings of works written by women (Les constellées), Daniel Grenier is what should be called an ally, although he does not set himself up as an example of perfection.
The warnings that his Ambrose Bierce serves in Heroines and Tombs to Oswald de Andrade, mastermind of the cannibalistic movement, about the limits of his fascination with indigenous cultures, the writer has somehow offered to himself.
The reissue at BQ of his 2015 novel The Longest Year, scheduled for August, was also an opportunity for him to touch up the text a little. Despite the nobility of his intentions, he had not been able to completely escape, he says, the posture of the white savior, in his way of portraying native and black characters.
“But by asking myself all these questions, I do not clear myself of a form of vampirism, which is of the order of any form of writing, he specifies. When one writes, one cannot completely get out of a form of exploitation of the other and, above all, of a form of exploitation of oneself. »
Since the publication of Françoise last (2018), Daniel Grenier has often been asked what has become of the woman in the title, the denouement of the book leaving many threads in suspense. That readers think of the destiny of a character on paper as if it were a real person undoubtedly testifies to the most beautiful power of fiction.
Insofar as true love takes nothing for granted, Heroines and Tombs is therefore perhaps less a book of “heartbreaking,” as Daniel Grenier puts it, than one of a renewal of vows binding it to the art of the novel, albeit on new bases.
“It is because we ask ourselves these questions about characters, about what is true and invented, that we continue to read fiction, he observes. And it is for these reasons that the game is worth the candle. Playing together is the most fun. »
