Scattered in a Rising Wind

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.

AUTHOR

Jean Marc Dalpé

Playwright, novelist, poet, screenwriter and actor Jean Marc Dalpé is a three-time recipient of the Governor General’s Literary Award: for his play Le Chien in 1988, for his anthology of plays Il n’y a que l’amour in 1999, and for his debut novel Un vent se lève qui éparpille (published in English as Scattered in a Rising Wind) in 2000. Over the years, he has translated works by several contemporary authors as well as classics by Shakespeare and Bertolt Brecht. He has also written stage adaptations of such works as the last chapter of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (Molly Bloom) and Marta Hillers’ memoir A Woman in Berlin. He recently appeared in Mansel Robinson’s play Deux (Théâtre du Nouvel-Ontario) and Gilles Poulin-Denis’s Dehors (Hôtel-Motel), and over the winter he toured western Canada with Gabriel Dumont’s Wild West Show, which he co-wrote with nine other writers (French, English, and Indigenous) and co-artistic directed. He holds two honorary doctorates for his body of work, from Laurentian University and the University of Ottawa. His latest play, La Queens’, premiered in January 2019 at Montreal’s Théâtre La Licorne, directed by Fernand Rainville.

AUTHOR

Linda Gaboriau

Linda Gaboriau is a Montreal-based dramaturge and literary translator. She has worked as a freelance journalist for the CBC as well as the Montreal Gazette, and worked in Canadian and Quebecois theatre. Gaboriau has won awards for her translations of more than 100 plays and novels by Quebec writers, including many of the Quebec plays best known to English Canadian audiences. She is the founding director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre.