A Comedy of Eros

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

Glen Shortliffe’s excellent translation of Le Libraire, a novel by the Quebec author Gerard Bessette (Paris: Juillard, 1960) was first published by Macmillan (Toronto) in 1962. The new and revised edition of Not for Every Eye, by Exile Editions, is a most welcome reminder of the existence of Bessette’s sharp-witted satire of small-town pre-1970 Quebec, where bigotry reigns and where a free-thinker like Hervé, the anti-hero of the story, can only drown his sorrows in huge quantities of beer and incidental sex, until a scandal offers him the opportunity to escape with a stolen truck load of “forbidden” (by the Index Librorum Prohibitorum) books to Montreal.

Shortliffe has masterfully rendered Bessette’s text, its sarcasm, its bitterness, its merciless por-trait of small yet powerful people. Bessette’s short novel is written in the tradition of Montesquieu and Voltaire, with resonances of Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet. Yet it is modern. Hervé resembles another anti-hero, Camus’s Outsider Meursault, and his story will sound familiar to many young and not-so-young intellectuals of our time: An employment office where the jobless have to prove that they are looking for work “in good faith,” a job without challenge, a withdrawal into cynicism as the sole defence mechanism against an unjust world. The killing of time in positions of underemployment, the drifting of images through the mind, the unspoken despair. A timely re-edition of a touching and at the same time wonderfully comic book.