Querelle of Roberval
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Shortlisted for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize • Winner of the 2023 ReLit Award for Fiction • Longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award
Homage to Jean Genet’s antihero and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of the Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.
As a millworkers’ strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval drags on, tensions start to escalate between the workers—but when a lockout renews their solidarity, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashing newcomer from Montreal. Strapping and unabashed, likeable but callow, by day he walks the picket lines and at night moves like a mythic Adonis through the ranks of young men who flock to his apartment for sex. As the dispute hardens and both sides refuse to yield, sand stalls the gears of the economic machine and the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent. Trenchant social drama, a tribute to Jean Genet’s antihero, and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lambert (You Will Love What You Have Killed) relocates the title character of Jean Genet's Querelle of Brest to a sawmill in Roberval, Quebec, in this vibrant if unwieldy homage. Querelle, 27, and his coworkers are on strike at the mill. Almost everyone desires him; his body is "born to be nude... his presence takes on a mystical, bewitching quality." He also "captivates and shocks" his coworkers, particularly Jézebel. There's also a subplot involving her sister, Judith, who considers working as a double agent among the strikers. In addition, three gay teens perform explicit sexual and criminal acts including necrophilia, featured in Dennis Cooperish sequences. The fuguelike narrative swells to include sections introducing a union buster known as the Hulk as well as the author himself, who, perhaps with a bit of sarcasm, claims to hold a "clear-cut position in support of the employers" as the story builds toward a violent showdown. The writing is strong, though the author threatens to sink the ship with an increasingly fragmented structure and an uneven tone, vacillating from graphic sex to quotidian tedium to political screeds. While fans of Genet's original will likely be disappointed, Lambert has unleashed his own strange beast.
