New edition of "The Casimir Effect"

I'm still throwing a bottle into the sea of the indifferent Internet by republishing, after reworking it from top to bottom, the novel The Casimir Effect. It was difficult work, I admit, because rereading the piece after twenty-five years brought me as much joy as unease.

First, the joy. I had fun reconnecting with the characters of this novel. My project at the time was ambitious, because I wanted to break my image as an author of difficult themes. In that, The Casimir Effect, with its subtitle A Quiet Novel, succeeds.

The idea for the novel is based on something I was told. A couple, the aunt and uncle of a friend in France, separated after some forty years together. The uncle had left to be with a woman much younger than him, but who bore the same first name as his wife! From that story I kept only the separation after all those years, and also the peculiarity that these two people hadn't actually lived together, the husband living upstairs, the wife on the ground floor. That kind of story isn't something you make up!

It was around the same time that I was reading a popular science book which discussed the famous Casimir effect (named after the scientist who proposed it), a peculiar physical phenomenon describing the behavior of two metal plates placed in a vacuum, which end up forming quantum bonds invisible to us.

The idea then germinated to build a novel around the woman left behind. Besides, my novels revolve a great deal around women who are abandoned or wounded. The Years Countdown is the only one to break from this theme, even though one of the female characters is blind — a kind of symbolism for constraint.

Now the unease. Several times while reading, I ran into implausibilities and contradictions, easy detours in the story, passages that felt a bit too tacked-on, to the point that I doubted the seriousness of the narrative, of its author (!), and perhaps also of my editor at the time, who was admittedly still finding his feet in literary editing (I really don't hold it against him!).

Here's an example. I was 45 when this text was written. The main character, Marthe, is 68. To me, that probably seemed very old at the time. I'm now 67, and the physical description I give of Marthe makes her out to be a much older woman! What's more, Léo, the love of her life, is ten years younger. Doing the math on how long they'd been together, he would have met Marthe when he was 13…

Instead of using Claude AI's services as I did for La Vie dure, I asked Codex (ChatGPT) to build me a timeline of the novel with my characters' ages (by the way, I don't use the free services — I pay for the minimum plan, which gives me a bit more depth and latitude).

Codex pointed out other contradictions to me, and I also had several reservations about scenes that struck me as truly superficial or that needlessly complicated the novel.

The work was therefore much more laborious than for my other book — more substantial rewriting and simplifying. I didn't hesitate to take an axe to certain scenes, and I asked the AI to watch over my actions so I wouldn't introduce further inconsistencies or errors.

After that, the translation was as easy as could be. That's where I called on Claude again, first to revise the French corrected by Codex, and to do a comparative reading of the English and French. Claude was fairly satisfied with its "competitor's" translation, though it flagged a few weaknesses here and there.

I skimmed through this translation, occasionally asking the AIs questions. I didn't have the courage to reread the English in full. Just as with Hard Weather, the English-speaking reader will still have a good reading experience, because I trust (perhaps naively) the current capabilities of these translation programs, lacking, of course, the means to fully reassure myself with an actual human translator… Any translator reading these lines will probably scoff in disdain. I feel like apologizing, but what would be the point?

I'll be accused of not being serious, or of being lazy. I certainly wouldn't have done this even a few years ago. As I said at the start, I'm just throwing a bottle into the sea. What I needed first was to breathe new life into these two works, and I'm already tackling the last text published by Varia, Les Années-rebours (which will be titled in English The Glasshour Years. I know, the real word is Hourglass, but the AI found my idea interesting, since it introduced a neologism echoing the French "rebours.")

So, thanks to a technology that is both unavoidable and formidable, an advance both magical and terrifying, I manage to find the motivation to write, to turn back in order to move forward better. In some ways it's just tilting at windmills, but on the other hand, since I still cried at certain passages, it convinced me that one must always seek to be moved, even amid the dust of one's past work.

The Casimir Effect was almost entirely ignored by critics. I once heard some kind words during a local radio show. They praised my originality and the boldness I'd shown in inventing a capital east of Quebec City. Because that's also what The Casimir Effect is: an imagined world near the river, one later revisited in Falaise. Repetition is like those bell towers that can never stray far from the sounds they're built to make.

The book is available in epub format and for direct reading here: https://guyverville.ca/en/books/the-casimir-effect.