Mercury Under Tongue describes the last weeks in the life of Frédéric Langlois, a young boy who, having arrived prematurely at the end of his life, is taking stock of his brief existence. Cursing compassion and complacency, the narrator lashes out at hope, love, the soul, religion – at all the illusions that humans need to ease their tragic condition.
TITLE : Mercury under my tongue
AUTHOR : Sylvain Trudel
COUNTRY : Canada
AUTHOR : Sylvain Trudel
COUNTRY : Canada
NUMBER OF PAGES : 132
SOLD TO: 10/18 (France), Matthes & Seitz (Germany), Soft Skull (USA), Alet Edizioni (Italy) and Minuskel (Norway)
SOLD TO: 10/18 (France), Matthes & Seitz (Germany), Soft Skull (USA), Alet Edizioni (Italy) and Minuskel (Norway)
EXCERPT
To my great misfortune, I have never believed in anything as simple as cloudless happiness, because I believe that things are at the same time good and bad, true or false depending on the day, sometimes even according to the varied nature of the light on a single day; anyway, things are often so murky that you see yourself as lost in the world, you think that we’re going to die because of all the things you no longer understand, as if you knew that you were on the brink of nothingness, a toe’s width from the fatal fall, and I sense that our souls can die as surely as our bodies. To put it another way, we die on all sides at once and at every moment, and that knowledge eats quietly away at our bones and brains, with a sound like the gnawing of a rat, until the day of the final sigh, when the rotten heart bursts. Many times I would like to speed it up, to be racing to my ruin like a madman, but there’s a problem: I’m afraid that I’m too big a coward to put an end to my ordeal on my own; barehanded. But the opposite could also be true: maybe I’m so strong that for me, the horror of pain and suffering is child’s play compared with the horror of annihilation and of everlasting solitude.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sylvain Trudel is an implacable novelist who sees literature not as distraction but rather as the art of probing our consciousness. His first novel, The Breath of the Harmattan, published in 1986 and rewritten in 2001, won over the critics who recognized in him a kinship with Réjean Ducharme. Since then, Sylvain Trudel has been publishing steadily novels, short stories, and books for children. He has twice been a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award.
To my great misfortune, I have never believed in anything as simple as cloudless happiness, because I believe that things are at the same time good and bad, true or false depending on the day, sometimes even according to the varied nature of the light on a single day; anyway, things are often so murky that you see yourself as lost in the world, you think that we’re going to die because of all the things you no longer understand, as if you knew that you were on the brink of nothingness, a toe’s width from the fatal fall, and I sense that our souls can die as surely as our bodies. To put it another way, we die on all sides at once and at every moment, and that knowledge eats quietly away at our bones and brains, with a sound like the gnawing of a rat, until the day of the final sigh, when the rotten heart bursts. Many times I would like to speed it up, to be racing to my ruin like a madman, but there’s a problem: I’m afraid that I’m too big a coward to put an end to my ordeal on my own; barehanded. But the opposite could also be true: maybe I’m so strong that for me, the horror of pain and suffering is child’s play compared with the horror of annihilation and of everlasting solitude.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Sylvain Trudel is an implacable novelist who sees literature not as distraction but rather as the art of probing our consciousness. His first novel, The Breath of the Harmattan, published in 1986 and rewritten in 2001, won over the critics who recognized in him a kinship with Réjean Ducharme. Since then, Sylvain Trudel has been publishing steadily novels, short stories, and books for children. He has twice been a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award.