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Scattered in a Rising Wind
By Jean Marc Dalpé
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
In a small town apocalypse, the social order of things can no longer prevail against the larger forces brought to bear on its insular, traditional, incestuous community. Marcel, in a cleansing, destructive rage, sets his murderous sights on the powers that rule this world.
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Overview
In a small town apocalypse, the social order of things can no longer prevail against the larger forces brought to bear on its insular, traditional, incestuous community. Marcel, in a cleansing, destructive rage, sets his murderous sights on the powers that rule this world.
Scattered in a Rising Wind records this rush of events barely at the edge of syntax; a teeming imagination always just ahead of the ability to articulate; with a participatory narrator that scrambles to keep up with the unfolding perceptions within the characters that surround him. Set in a tiny claustrophobic mill town north of Sudbury, the language borrows the reader to animate its utterly amoral characters as embodiments of the most elemental of human passions. Almost devoid of the conventions of punctuation, capitalization and other grammar rules designed to control language and enforce its sequential linearity, occasionally breaking its prose margins to become minimalist utterances, the novel constantly moves into “a future that has nothing to do with the past. ” Yet the past is constantly re-constructed backwards in all its recurring archetypes by the characters, their actions, even their names. Just as the narrator says of the main character, Marcel, “a lot of what he thinks he remembers is invented,” the reader is left, in the end, with Marcel’s Oedipal revenge, the incestuous passion of a Joseph for a Mary of divine birth, and the barren rose of love echoing like a shot to the head, a tattoo on the heart. There is no time here.
Linda Gaboriau
Linda Gaboriau is an award-winning literary translator based in Montréal. Her translations of plays by Québec’s most prominent playwrights have been published and produced across Canada and abroad. In her work as a literary manager and dramaturge, she has directed numerous translation residencies and international exchange projects. She is the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. Gaboriau has twice won the Governor General’s Award for Translation: in 1996, for Daniel Danis’s Stone and Ashes, and in 2010, for Wajdi Mouawad’s Forests.
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- Dimensions 160 pages, 140 x 216 x 13 mm
- Published September 15, 2003
- Publisher Talonbooks
- Category Fiction
- Keywords Literary
Other titles by Jean Marc Dalpé
Other titles by Linda Gaboriau
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