Accelerate

Seven notebooks kept between 1968 and 1991, in which Pierre Turgeon explores his relationship to writing and to absolute reality. Seven notebooks collected that go beyond the anecdotal and the state of mind to take us, with the author, behind the scenes and under the scenes of the act of writing, into the identity of a writer-novelist-journalist, scriptwriter-publisher. Pierre Turgeon from the inside, the secret universe of his psyche, where fantasy and dreams rub shoulders with freedom, dark and bright corners: places of creation, space of the inner gaze, in Greece, Paris, Mexico, Berlin, Montreal, Philadelphia. With each word, Turgeon dives into the known and the unknown that defines him and that he explores through the writing of this dive.

Excerpt

Sparrows hop in the ivy of my windows. On the left, the great golden wave of the rising sun rises the Richelieu valley. On the right, only the steepest walls of Mont Saint-Hilaire remain in shadow. I force myself to do everything in slow motion, starting with my breathing. To let this calm untie me and calm me down. I am beginning to taste the tranquility.

Throughout my life, I have been a true cult of speed. The bumpy truth of the world can only be discovered at more than a hundred an hour, and only the contraction of time produced by the cinema can show the blossoming of a rose. The texts gathered here were written in accelerated time. They are the notebooks of a man in a hurry, the thoughts, and impressions of a shattered existence. They are by no means edifying or exemplary. On the contrary, these texts will perhaps be of interest to those who - as Novalis said - "rejoice in observing the future of human nature." Most of them were written while travelling, the fruit of those soliloquies I was forced to do in the tents at train stations, airports and restaurants. For me, disorientation and inspiration are the two sides of the same exile. The only unfragmented chapter of this book corresponds, moreover, to my only prolonged and idle stay abroad, in Greece in 1971.

These erratic and breathless trips, I would do them again without hesitation, on the condition that I get my twenty-year-old legs back. But I am forty-two years old. I am approaching the second side of my life. It's normal that I want to brake when I go down this steep slope.
Reviews

Turgeon does an open-heart operation of language, revealing its anatomy by vivisection rather than dissection. This is the literature in the first instance. When the words speak for themselves, they provide a series of grief described by the new rhetoric. Do they really speak of anything other than themselves? Turgeon's ideas on language seem to provide the key to an intellectual methodology which he applies to this essay. Here thought obeys a certain rhythm or beat, rock, jazz, or classical texts. In other words: it dances. Let me dance an essay.

Jean-Pierre Issenhuth - Liberté

About the Author
Born in Quebec City, October 9, 1947 - Novelist and essayist, Pierre Turgeon published his first novel, Sweet Poison, when he was only 22 years old. Several works followed 22 titles in all: novels, essays, plays, film scripts, and historical works. He won twice the Governor General's Award. As a publisher, he released more than a thousand authors, amongst which Magaret Atwood, Peter Newman, and Jack Higgins. He is also the only Canadian publisher to have one of his books, a biography of Michael Jackson by Ian Halperin, Unmasked, reach the top spot on the New York Times bestseller list. He also authored 16 movie scripts, one of which, The Mighty River, became an Oscar finalist.