Lourdes, by Catherine Lemieux (French only)

Look, I don't know why I had this book on my list (as with just about every book I read. I'll have to sort that out.) But the good thing about not knowing is that every time, I have no idea what I'm getting myself into. In the case of LourdesI was pleasantly surprised. It has the scornful tone of Royal (Jean-Philippe Baril Guérard), but deals with the literary world, which I know, unlike the legal field. I had the exquisite sensation of being understood. If you're at all familiar with the academic world and have been exasperated by the cant that can dominate it, I bet you'll love it.

Summary

Lourdes is a young student who crosses the Atlantic to study at an unnamed university somewhere in Europe. She's working on a so-called feminist poet, and she hopes, thanks to her stay, to somehow understand the secret of this author who fascinates her, and at the same time, to understand herself.

Most of the novel takes place at a conference, entitled "Laboratory of the Feminizing Neo-Ego", where literary experts expound their theories on the work of the poet in question. Lourdes attends as an attendant at the snack bar, ready to absorb all the wisdom of these great academics.

Does this experience bring her closer to the truth? Let's just say it's open to debate. But what is certain is that Lourdes' psyche did not emerge unscathed.

Impressions

Surely someone would have to pay you to convince you to attend a lecture on the feminine strength of a fictional poet. For this one, however, I would have paid to be there.

I don't know how Catherine Lemieux managed to reproduce so well the stupid literary language we frequently hear in the field, without the reader clearly feeling that he's being given a quick pass, but without leaving any room for any attempt to take this discourse seriously either. The discourse itself is coherent, we feel that it's going somewhere and that's what makes us want to continue, but at the same time, what vacuity! Reading these great thinkers ranting it from the heights of their oversized egos was really funny. I had the time of my life.

I'm the right audience: I'm a linguist, but in my bachelor's degree, I also studied literature. And while I don't regret it (it was an item on my bucket list), let's just say that my time in literature definitely convinced me not to pursue it. I had a few good courses, in which I really felt I was learning what makes a text give such and such an impression on the reader, what gives it its relevance and originality, how it reflects the social context in which it was written, and so on. It was also in my literature classes that I learned how to write coherent, faultless texts of any length in record time.

But I've also had an embarrassing number of classes where I felt that supposed experts were having fun making unsubstantiated claims with great confidence. A psychoanalytical analysis of a Quebec novel by a doctoral student (who thus spent his days combing through the same text to find arguments for his hypothesis), and certain class discussions where certain people, always the same ones, expressed themselves, have particularly impressed me.

I suspect that Catherine Lemieux had a similar experience to mine. Except that she used it to good effect: to develop her art (she writes really well), and to criticize the field. It's brilliant, and enjoyable.