A Provisional Life

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Governor General’s Award–winner André Major has written an
existential novel about a Montreal journalist who, after the breakup of
his marriage, lives for a while in the Dominican Republic. The
descriptions of his exile contain echoes of Camus, while his nausea
recalls Sartre’s novel of the same title. Although well-written and
skilfully translated, the novel is too melancholic to be entirely
satisfactory. Its solutions to the dilemmas of human existence are both
too simple and too provisional.

One way in which the protagonist expresses his ennui is to stretch out
with a book, “for these days it was in fiction that he seemed to find
the bittersweet taste of existence.” A Provisional Life has a
bittersweet taste, but unfortunately not much more.