Crever mon fils

I love you… me neither. All the ambiguity of difficult romantic relationships can be found in Guy Verville’s second novel, _Crever mon fils_, a harsh and violent book that spares us neither pain nor pleasure. Clarisse and Simon are an unusual couple despite their reassuring appearance: they have one child and Clarisse is pregnant again. But Simon prefers men and seldom approaches his wife, who feels a profound revulsion at the thought of her second pregnancy. Deeply shaken by a conception her mind cannot accept while her body welcomes it naturally, Clarisse harbours murderous desires toward the embryo growing inside her. With a certain audacity for a male writer still early in his career, Guy Verville presents the woman’s point of view with such interior depth that readers accept Clarisse’s hatred and disgust because they come from a character who rings true.

Writing that seems to imitate the very jolts of this turbulent life heightens the tension of a painful, heartrending novel that nevertheless avoids gratuitous effects.

Published in Quebec, Guy Verville’s novel richly deserves to cross the Atlantic and reach us. It scratches through appearances to uncover the truth beneath—always worth telling, even and especially when it hurts.

Guy Verville delivers a novel as sharp as a slap: uncompromising and written in an unadorned language that occasionally produces beautiful flashes, especially when he abandons a somewhat clumsy poetry, no doubt added to soften a world of rupture. His novel carries a dark richness in which everyday tragedy finds expression as it rarely does in Quebec literature.