For viewers watching a long tracking shot, wonderment has to be integral to the experience. As the camera winds through, say, the Netherfield ball scene in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (or through corridors of hospital-set gunfire in John Woo’s Hard Boiled), any aficionado can’t help but marvel at the technical competence required to achieve an uninterrupted take—actors, sound, lighting, and a camera operator walking backwards—that runs close to three minutes.
May Our Joy Endure begins with a literary equivalent: Part 1, a single chapter taking place at an exclusive birthday party, clocks in at 70 pages. Elaborate lengthy sentences—scores of them, a kind of ‘tracking shot’ within the tracking shot—unfurl for a third of a page, a half-page, and heighten awareness of/reservations about/annoyance at (you choose) the performative aspects of the writing style Montrealer Kevin Lambert chose for this, his third novel:
If Gabriela seemed strong on the day of her hiring, a confident young woman who held herself erect at the entrance of the studio, trying to attach her bicycle helmet to the strap of her vegan leather bag, if she had seemed capable of slaying all those disgusting creatures, dressed as she was in an armour of European linen made 50 percent from sustainable materials, if this assurance sometimes frightened her colleagues when for the first time a woman called into question this lazy ideal they thought to be pure genius, it was because, like those engaging cutthroats who peopled her childhood imagination, Gabriela had, at the age of twenty, seized a sword to kill the young girl she had been, slipping into the bedroom of young Gaby—her dirty glasses and her hair full of knots, spending hours on her bed, devouring thick books in which she almost always found a map of imaginary lands where the story took place—placing a hand on a shoulder and planting a sword in the neck, pitiless, two solemn tears coursing down her cheeks.
In contrast to film viewers, readers who encounter the literary tracking shot need to concentrate; the potential for pleasure, for readerly joy, is perhaps undercut by any brow-furrowing sentence of a dozen or more clauses, especially one after the next in a weighty series.
As much as I was impressed and occasionally galled by these sentences, my relief was palpable when, in Part II, Lambert returned to the sort of short, punchy chapters—ten of them—that, in part, made Querelle of Roberval, such an enjoyable read. Part III, a party scene as well, returns to the allusive density, complex syntax, and technical dexterity of the opening section, only doubled in size.
The style, to switch metaphors, stands there an inescapable physical fact from the very start, a hurtle. Some might leap over it with beguiling ease, others might stumble and fall. Still others: “Enough already, I’m done!”
Any review’s précis (700 words, say, to explain a 90,000-word book) is necessarily simplifying, inaccurate, and incomplete. That’s particularly true of May Our Joy Endure. While a summary account—“The novel captures the rise, fall, and questionable redemption of Céline Wachowski, septuagenarian billionaire, renowned architect, and ‘global star’”—relates the gist of the plot’s arc, it completely fails to indicate the novel’s bristling, vivid, and astonishingly vivid portraiture, whether of Céline herself, her friends and colleagues, the world of wealth and privilege she circulates freely within, or the atmosphere of “the great misunderstanding that took society by storm”—about which, Céline has no shortage of bilious regard, whether it’s the “right-thinking left” (“petty ideological terrorists,” the “new priests and new Pharisees of virtue”), the “oblivious public” (a “tribal, animalistic tyranny”), Quebec society in general (repository of “abject stupidity and ignominy,” “desiccated thought processes” and an “injurious” climate for discourse).
On one page or the next the novel feels cerebral, Swiftian, or Joycean in its breadth and playfulness (Proustian too, insofar as complexity and excoriating view of humanity are concerned); playing satirist, tragedian, humorist, and social historian, Lambert produces a unique book that contains a complete world.
A unique book that contains a complete world … The show-stopping output of a unparalleled literary talent.
Though May Our Joy Endure asks—well, demands—readers to do the work and pay attention to the shifts of perspective, follow the changes of subject matter, and, of course, resign themselves to sentences that really do go on (the inaugural sentence, at 27 lines, alerts any reader about what’s to come), there’s every reason to push forward. Abrasive, funny, critical, spirited, and, above all, the show-stopping output of a unparalleled literary talent, it’s a challenging novel whose every page offers something to savour and value.
Born in 1992, Kevin Lambert grew up in Chicoutimi, Quebec. May Our Joy Endure won the Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. His second novel, Querelle de Roberval, was acclaimed in Quebec, where it was nominated for four literary prizes; in France, where it was a finalist for the Prix Médicis and Prix Le Monde and won the Prix Sade; and Canada, where it was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. His first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, also widely acclaimed, won a prize for the best novel from the Saguenay region and was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. Lambert lives in Montreal.
Donald Winkler is a translator of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He is a three-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for French-to-English translation. He lives in Montreal.
Publisher: Biblioasis (September 3, 2024)
Paperback 8″ x 5″ | 224 pages
ISBN: 9781771966207
Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.
- Brett Josef Grubisichttps://miramichireader.ca/author/brett-josef-grubisic/
