A review of Querelle de Roberval by Kevin Lambert
I picked up Querelle de Roberval at work and decided to read it with absolutely zero expectations or knowledge of its contents, only a deep love for Genetās work. It is, it seems, meant to be an homage or at least inspired by Genetās novel Querelle de Brest. I spent the time it took me to read the book completely uncertain whether I liked it or not, and after having finished the novel and mulled it over for the rest of the day, I think I have to conclude that I didnāt like it.
It is well written; Lambertās prose is stylish, sharp, and flows well. I am not Canadian and therefore donāt know the nuances of specifically Quebecois politics or social issues, but I really struggled to pin down the political message of this book, and it was clearly gunning for something. The ironic, fourth-wall breaking chapter at the latter half of the book set the stakes for the rest of the book too high; the scene in which the neighborhood Greek chorus mourns over Querelleās body does not feel as heightened as it was obviously meant to feel, because the fourth wall chapter cuts down any faith the reader may have in its glory or passion.
Stylistically it felt like two separate novels that someone had attempted to twist together into one -- the realism of the strike, and the poetic fantasy of Querelleās world and that of the other queer boys. Unfortunately, either the attempt at combining them was not strong enough, or the lyrical alienation of the queer world from the straight working class world was not deliberate enough.
Aside from the two main characters, Querelle and Jezabel, the rest of the cast felt undercooked; some were not fleshed out thoroughly enough, and some should have remained more like two-dimensional side characters but were given only a little bit extra characterization and therefore felt strange and incomplete.
And unfortunately I couldnāt help but compare Lambertās work to Genetās original, and it falls far short of the beauty of Querelle de Brest, or Genetās work in general.
Part of the fascination of Genetās work is how often violence or āperversionā (sexual or otherwise) is not an act of revenge or anger, but one of love or reverence, and more importantly one of transcendence. Aside from the descriptions of Querelle with his lovers and Jezabelās final act in the pool, this symbolism and emotional transformation did not occur. The violence was just violence, something more akin to torture porn than something loving, transcendent, or symbolic. Murder itself - the actual taking of a life - as an extension of the self and therefore an act of complete liberation of the self is not the point of Lambertās work like it is in Genetās. Instead, it is the violence itself, the causing of pain that he seems to focus on. In Genetās work (particularly Funeral Rites), consumption of another is not an act of revenge or hatred as it is in this work, but one of reverence and love. Acts of violence such as sacrifice, murder, and betrayal take on a transcendent, romantic symbolism because they are acts in which the self is destroyed and transformed into something else. Corruption, violation, violence, perversion, are rarely about the outside world directly. Rather, they are ways in which the self becomes something more, confirms itself to be a living thing or an empty thing or a thing which acts out of love, submission, or dominance. Rarely are acts of violence things Genetās characters do solely for themselves; they are ways in which two characters are eternally entwined, which is what makes his violent or twisted characters so romantic.
All this is something that is consistent throughout Genetās work and blatant in both his direct prose and his symbolism. Much of the violence in Lambertās work lacks that philosophical thoughtfulness, and the political passion that would have smoothed that over does not seem fully thought out.
Unlike Genet, whose feelings towards authority have a conscious duality and whose works are unmistakably working-class, with the questionable morals of its characters being portrayed as a positive aspect, Lambert seems more intent on portraying the strikers as reprehensible in their actions, in that they are merely violent rather than transcendent in some way. This frames their actions then as either simply brutish or ultimately futile, rather than an act or event which either allows them to come alive for the first time or to change their self into something else. It also means that the characters whose morals are more āold-fashionedā like Fauteux or Bernard do not have the same dark, rounded-out intent and shadowy depths like that of Mario in Querelle de Brest, and instead are simply shallow and unlikable due to sexism etc.
In Genetās works, violence always, always means something symbolically, and its meaning is usually expanded upon through descriptions of the characterās internal monologue or reaction or transformation. But much of the violence in this book was simply vengeful or retaliatory (the coffee, the molotov cocktails) and the moments during and after the fight with the baseball bats did not dig deep enough into any symbolism to make it feel like anything more than a violent, vengeful midnight rumble at a park. The closest thing was perhaps Jezabelās vision in the grass of the little children healing her wounds and the neighborhood sleepwalkers singing a Greek chorus mourning for Querelle, but even that did not quite dig deep enough into the the tender, sensitive bits of Jezabelās emotional transformation.
Querelle, in this case, was not a vehicle by which the novelās characters as well as the reader are made to ponder relationships between people who mirror each other or expose hitherto unknown passions or weaknesses; instead, he was simply a vehicle for violence that is hardly thought out, and the brief paragraph referencing the sexual insecurities and incestuous perversions of the fathers was not enough to change that. Similarly, the sex scenes in the novel could have been the most Genet-esque thing about Lambert's text, but it supplants the transcendent and self-defining or self-immolating nature of strange or unsavoury sex in Genet's works with simple brutality. The "second" boy of the three unnamed teenagers nearly meets the brief, as he is described as having love within him that the other two must dig out, but Lambert only allows this theme a single sentence, then returns to grotesque and visceral sex without the layers of symbolism and subconscious conflict that gives Genet's views on sex that mystical, philosophical quality.
Within Genetās work, his voice not as the narrator but as the literal writer Jean Genet is consistently inserted, so that throughout all of his novels he inserts himself and his own thoughts and experiences into the narrative, breaking the fourth wall to describe a memory or emotion of his past that connects through layers of symbolism and feeling to the narrative. The single chapter in which Lambert breaks the fourth wall and lets his voice through does no such thing, and is introduced so late in the novel that it simply pulls the reader out of the narrative entirely, and it is a struggle to get back into it.
No matter how meandering or erratic the narrative of Genetās work, it always seems extremely self-contained, as though Genet has tight control over every piece of the story and his choices to digress to a personal memory or focus on a different character are deliberate. The self-contained nature of Genet gives the reader the sense that he is writing for himself first, and for an audience second. Lambertās work, while interesting, canāt decide if it wants to be a kitchen sink drama or magical realist, and therefore its rambling nature seems less self-contained and less controlled.
I think the major issues I had with this book were its ambiguous political stance, its uncooked characters, and its rather bland use of violence. Compared to Genetās deeply personal, extremely strong and passionate symbolism and emphasis on emotional and mental transformation, this novel felt shallow and disconnected, and without any firmly established positions, opinions, or symbols. I think if an author writes a novel and deliberately mimics the title and main character of a different, more famous novel, they should have a clear and solid reason why they have chosen to draw such a distinct and direct line, and some consciousness of how their work will be compared to the other by readers. This book seemed to lack that clear reason or that consciousness.
