Arvida is a small
settlement of 12,000 people (2010) in Quebec, that is part of the City of
Saguenay. Founded as an industrial city by the aluminium giant Alcoa in 1927,
this is a settlement with dark secrets, ghosts, ritual body mutilations. For
writer Samuel Archibald, Arvida “was a place of refuge wherealmost everything
could be wiped away and forgotten Arvida was a town for second chances, undue
hopes and also games.”
“Arvida has never been
a town at the crux of history, but rather a place resolutely outside it.”, “a
kind of working class mythology”, Arvida is like a photo, “a very beautiful
photo from after the war, which was, like all beautiful photos, an empty
picture, with practically nothing in it and everything outside it.”
Just like the town
itself, our collection of stories live outside of the norm, they live on the
fringes, and although a collection of short stories they form a cohesive whole,
the dark corners of an industrial town, the secrets in families…
Samuel Archibald’s
debut collection “Arvida” won the 2012 Prix Cuop de cœur Renaud-Bray in it’s
original French language, and the English translation was shortlisted for the
20165 Scotiabank Giller Prize, one of the few writers writing in French to have
made the shortlist with only four French language works since the prize began
in 1994. Note: Not being an expert in French Language Canadian literature these
figures may be slightly incorrect, I have included Pascale Quiviger for “The Perfect
Circle”, Gaétan Coucy for “The Immaculate Conception” in 2006 and Daniel
Poliquin “A Secret Between Us” in 2007.
The collection opens
with the story of our narrator’s father, and all of his memories being
associated with food, despite the fact that our narrator’s mother was an amazing
cook, and his father loved food, he would sit and watch others eat their dinner,
not partaking himself. A explained in the opening story, “My father and Proust,
Arvida I”:
When I think about it now, the comedy darkens. The ore I age, the more
something tragic makes its presence felt, the sense of a bitter nostalgia at
the core of all things: the idea of wanting to do something magnanimous for
people who ask for nothing and are in need of nothing; the idea of a sacrifice
reduced to a risible and secret simulacrum; the idea that the object of desire
has nothing to do with desire itself; the idea that fulfilment of the desire
never satisfies it, nor does it make it disappear, and that in the midst of all
the things longed for desire survives in us, dwindling into remorse and regret.
Our collection
includes stories of hunting and large mythical cats, people with the profession
of making others redundant, mixed with nature, the idea that it is larger than
mankind itself. A tale of a botched illegal immigration from Canada into
Detroit with a Costa Rican girl, a story that involved goons, cocaine, alcohol
and not a lot of planning or money – it is the story of América.
Antigonish is a story
of ceaseless travel and the pursuit of nowhere, somewhere:
America’s a bad idea that’s come a long way. I’ve always thought that,
but it doesn’t paint a very good picture.
I should have said: America’s a bad idea that has gone every which way.
An idea that’s spawned endless roads leading nowhere, roads paved in asphalt or
pounded into the earth or laid out with gravel and sand, and you can cruise
them for hours to find pretty much zilch at the other end, a pile of wood,
metal, bricks, and an old guy on his feet in the middle of the road, asking:
“Will you goddam well tell me what the hell you’re doing around here?”
America is full of lost roads and places that really don’t want anyone
to get there. It took fools to make these roads and fools to live at the end of
them, and there’s no end of fools, but me, I’m another kind of fool, one of
those who tries to reinvent history, pushing on to the very last road, and the
very last god-forsaken destination.
I’m sure they’ve made a much more welcoming road not, with scenic walks
and lookouts and all that stuff, but in those days, driving the Cabot Trail at
night in the middle of a storm was a crazy idea. The guy at the Cape North gas
bar had been polite enough not to say anything. He’d only said, “Drive fifteen,
twenty miles an hour, no more, and God willing, you’ll get to the other end.”
With hints of the two
Davids; Cronenberg, Lynch but with a distinctive small town voice that allows
the tales to dribble unknown into your consciousness, this is a haunting
collection, one that will slowly infiltrate your memory, just like living in a
settlement on the fringes, these tales float on the fringes of your mind.
The story “A mirror in
the mirror” tells the moving and haunting tale of a woman living in her
deceased parent’s home, her husband away in Montreal, she lingers in the home
and surrounds, not seeking an outside connection through to the tale “Jigai”
the story of a woman who “came from the ends of the earth with pebbles in her
pockets” and practices ritual body mutilation on the women of the surrounding
areas, all with their permission of course.
Later in the
collection there becomes a shift to the very personal “The Centre of Leisure
and Forgetfulness, Arvida II” a further account of the writer’s upbringing,
family, his memories of Arvida; “there was nothing more Arvidian that to forget
Arvida itself.” Which clearly our writer has not done! The continuing
meta-fiction ends the collection with “Madeleines, Arvida III” a wonderfully
personal story of how Archibald became a writer, how to tell stories (or not tell
stories) and a circular reference to the beginning of the collection, and the opening
lines.
The publisher
Biblioasis says they are “committed to the idea that translations must come
from the margins of linguistics cultures as well as from the power centres” and
this is a collection for the margins, a brilliant travel into small town Canada.
A work that will linger with me for quite sometime and one that I believe will
be among the discussions when the Best Translated Book Award judges sit down to
formulate their longlist.
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