Exterminated Angel

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

Obviously, Guernica’s publisher, Antonio d’Alfonso, has decided to
acquaint the anglophone reader with literary works that are also a
testimony to Quebec’s history. Clément Marchand’s Vanishing
Villages, published the same year as this novel, spoke of rural Quebec
transforming itself into an urban society. Exterminated Angel presents
with pitch-black humor an overview of the early 1970s, an era dominated
by politicians bereft of values and principles and undermined by
organized crime.

Born in 1938, Gérald Godin, a journalist, was a minister in the Parti
Québécois government. This novel, Godin’s first, published when the
author was 52 years old, makes fun of us all: of our pompous attitudes,
of our jargon-loaded way of speaking, of public relations and politics,
of the superficiality of love and religion. When Cardinal Peter C.
Thing-a-Magic and the director of Les Pompes Funиbres Enregistrées
bury an infamous citizen and unscrew the crucifix that embellishes the
coffin, the reader is carried away by Godin’s exuberance, for which
translator Judith Cowan has found the perfect tone.