You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kevin Lambert

You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kevin Lambert
Translated from French by Donald Winkler

End-of-the-world surrealism in the voice of a child in Chicoutimi, Quebec.

Are you up for something totally weird? Something in a macabre vein? Faldistoire, the gay boy who narrates this tale, is already jaded by the time he's in Grade 2. 

        They teach us all sorts of stupid things at Rejean-Tremblay School. They boil down the meaning of life for us and make us swallow it in little pills to calm us at lunch or when the nurse comes to see us and meets us privately to deliver her messages: don't trust anyone you don't know, get vaccinated, this is how to brush your teeth, my-body's-no-body's-but-mine, beware of Halloween candies where old perverts have hidden long poisoned needles that will send you right to your grave, you have to inspect them and throw away anything suspicious.

Children in his neighbourhood are abused by adults, they die by accident and by homicide. Toads watch over their graves in the local cemetery. Transgender folk don't have it easy in Chicoutimi either.

        Thanks to our family connection, I find pictures of Paule before her operation in the photo albums of Angele, my grandfather Fernand's sister. He had been her golden boy before he was disowned by the whole family because of his transexual lunacies. When you eat at my great-aunt's and, a bit tipsy, she starts talking about her only son abducted by the demons of sodomy because his father was never there to discipline him and to alert him to sexuality's most twisted vices, I pretend to go to sleep on the couch and I listen to her song and dance as she curses a life that always gives all good things to the same people, Mother Nature who makes families of ten children without a single one that's fucked up, while my great-aunt is there all alone to shovel the shit of the entire world.

After he has completed Grade 6, Faldistoire's father chooses to send him to the private school in town.

        The Lycee charged money for the admissions test, each year's registration, the uniform that had to be changed every two years because we grew too fast, the shorts and T-shirts for physical education because of the new logo, every extracurricular activity and the materials required for it. The Lycee, a business masquerading as a school, with all the good intentions--bogus--of the teachers who, only once a year, on the day for parental visits, made as if they gave a damn.

The students' favourite teacher in high school is Madame Marjolaine:

        We were sure that she was the queen of sexuality, we imagined that she knew everything about blow jobs, anal penetration, cunts and cunnilingus, all those things we knew the names of but didn't know what they really were, and in time we would go and check out Google and watch a video that would give us our education, the real one.

Faldistoire is expected only to "survive as one raises one's head out of murky and toxic water." But doesn't everyone have a right to more than that? To thrive? In this novel, the ghosts are bent on revenge, on blowing up the status quo, on demolishing "beautiful things prized for no reason." It's a wild ride.

Giller chances: MEDIUM - It's unusual and strangely compelling, but probably too nihilistic for the Giller.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.