Sadie Graham Reviews:

Kevin Lambert, Trans. Donald Winkler, Querelle of Roberval, Biblioasis, 2022
Gabriel Cholette, Trans. Elina Taillon, Scenes from the Underground, Arachnide Editions, 2022

Alienation, by definition, involves a certain sideways orientation to the rest of the world; it follows that queers can easily slip into the fantastic, horrid, unthinkable and sublime. Kevin Lambert’s Querelle of Roberval, translated by Donald Winkler, was published in English by Biblioasis after winning the Prix Sade, among other national and international honours. The novel opens on a fantastic note with ‘the little slutboys of love’ begging to be taken by the handsome yet callous Querelle, who ‘strings them on a necklace’ as he beds them one after another. But this quickly takes a turn for the morbid—his beautiful boys ‘know well, feeling his forearm choke off our air, that one day he will strangle one of us, and slash his throat with a serrated blade, raining down seed on his viscera.’ Querelle relishes in transgression, in the squirm of discomfort, where arousal putrefies and transforms with repulsion. In so doing, it holds the reader determinedly at a remove, dragging them along like Hector’s corpse behind the chariot of the text’s own ravenous momentum. 

Appropriately enough, Querelle is divided in the tradition of Greek tragedy: ‘PARODOS’, ‘STASIMON’, ‘KOMMOS’, ‘EXODOS’. Unlike its namesake and inspiration, Jean Genet’s Querelle de Brest (and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s adaptation, Querelle (1982)), Lambert’s sophomore novel takes place in a northern Quebec logging town where Querelle, a newcomer from Montreal, votes with his coworkers at the sawmill to go on strike. When the boss’s tactics get dirty, bleach poured into cups of Tim’s coffee at the picket line, the union’s efforts escalate accordingly. Bleach begets broken bottles, then baseball bats, then blood. Exodos. 

The novel’s treatment of alienation is threefold. Querelle and his boys fuck the nights away in their lust-blood-sex world apart from the mundane operations of heteronormative society and away from the rules of parents, school and jobs. The prose maintains a superficial depth, never going too deeply into any character’s head. The narrative dilates and contracts dispassionately as it moves between the workers, the loggers, the bosses and the families, inspecting their beliefs and hypocrisies, connecting the organs within the social body to reveal how each is beholden to ‘the substructure of all the businesses, all the services offered by the municipality,’ each ‘a spider in its web responsive to every fluctuation, to each tiny convulsion in the invisible world of commerce.’ There is a sense of displaced location, of absent or dissociated presence. Capitalism, as always, depersonalizes, machinizes, alienates and eats. 

Novels of alienation sometimes teeter into traps of relatability or mundanity—understandably, as both writers and readers navigate a deeply alienated world every day. Dissociative prose is de rigueur. Where Querelle evades these traps is in its dedication to transgression, to legacies of transgressive queer literature. (The original Héliotrope edition is dedicated, in part, À Dennis Cooper.) In scenes of sex and violence, the tenor is heightened and visceral, melodramatic and overwrought and camp by turn, a verbal choreography reminiscent of fellow Canadian author Derek McCormack. Everyone has a huge cock (or an ‘impressive member’); boys are impaled; they are ‘swallowers of his honeyed jism.’ This is not without humour, irony or bathos; for instance, as a teenaged throuple kills time with a trunk full of Molotov cocktails:

the second has taken his [scarf] off to apply his lips to his lover’s huge cock, to take it hot into his throat, to move his tongue up and down without his bandana falling over his eyes when he looks into those of his buddy.

The prose can be beautiful and sensual, lingering on details like ‘the smell of a freshly hewn trunk, the texture of the bruised wood which, its crust removed, still oozes a bit of sap.’ Sentences are long, paragraphs longer; occasionally, this can become tortured to the point of incoherence, as when a boy sends Querelle a nude selfie, ‘stretched out on his stomach, adjusting the lighting and framing the image to reveal both his imploring lips and his arched behind, thrust out thanks to the actions of his hips and lower back to accentuate the beauty he’s concealing.’ The jumbled limbs, bodies and perspectives in these instances do make an odd sort of sense, perhaps, under capitalism. 

Matters deteriorate. Where Querelle’s perversions of polite society align him with the union (another perversion of polite society), he is also, still, always, apart, marked by and for violence and its ends. The final pages are an absurd, baroque horror show; one scene in particular involving our teenaged throuple is reminiscent of Gregg Araki’s The Living End (1992), in which two gay men find in their HIV diagnoses the liberatory impetus for a spiritual journey to—literally and figuratively—fuck everything. You could perhaps say that our three slutboys unionize. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, and all that. 

Tragedy and horror share a certain fantastical commitment to the bit, where (as Lambert writes) ‘at every twist in the tale a new layer is applied…there is a heightening of alarm and a crescendo of the voice.’ These are old, mythic narrative structures. Another recent queer release, Gabriel Cholette’s Scenes from the Underground—released in English by House of Anansi’s imprint Arachnide, translated by Elina Taillon and illustrated by Jacob Pyne—draws on folk legend and fairytale narrative elements to embellish the narrator’s descent into a labyrinthine queer nightlife. But where Querelle crescendos, Scenes drifts at one note, never unraveling or imploding, merely tracing the walls, following threads without quite getting anywhere at all. 

In Scenes from the Underground, we follow a PhD student in medieval studies from Montreal to Berlin via his ‘field notes’ of various nightclubs, hookups, narcotic experiences and disappointments. These brief vignettes are sketched in light, quick-moving prose with a chatty, candid tone. While the first vignette does feel like a first scene, and the last like a last, there is no real sense of the passage of time between the field notes: they don’t seem to be strictly chronological, with friends and lovers weaving in and out at random, and no real changes occur in the narrator’s persona, voice or life circumstances as we perceive them. This creates a dream-like effect as one reads, and raises the question: What is the organizing logic of this archive? 

In the second vignette (‘HOMEMADE PORNO’) our narrator meets Jacob, who ‘has a particular fetish: collecting face-dick pics. This type of photo is a powerful weapon…because it’s the only infallible way of associating the equipment with its owner,’ or, of certifying one’s true identity. The narrator sends him a video, and in so doing—like giving your true name to the fair folk—ties himself to Jacob, if not Jacob to him. These fairytale logics run through Scenes as the narrator descends into the tunnels and dark rooms ‘where [his] initiation will take place,’ where old, undesired men like ‘goblins circle around [him].’ At Lab.Oratory, one such club, ‘if you travel straight you’ll end up back where you were at the beginning.’ Scenes can feel similarly circular, as if not only the narrator but the narrative itself is stuck in a rut. Of course, ‘the rule is…when it seems like everyone around you is a goblin, the thing is—you are one as well.’ 

Yet the prose stays in this dreamy stasis without going into the many places dreams can go: feverish, psychedelic, nightmarish or goblin-like. Even when the tone becomes poetic or fantastic, its emotional palette is limited. The sex is plentiful but sketched in, vague at times in a way that can feel oddly prudish: ‘My tongue is in its favoured element…it escapes his mouth to start licking everything, from top to bottom, from left to right, from the inside outward.’ Pyne’s illustrations are often more explicit than the text. Scenes leans more toward the erotic, the inconvenient, unexpected or unpleasantly pleasurable. Swim teams threaten to piss on each other; pills are taken off a bathroom floor. It’s all certainly queer, but like poetry, erotics can be vaporous or cerebral, gesturing at rather than grasping the thing itself. 

The second-to-last vignette (‘NOTHING BREAKS LIKE A HEART’) takes place in a taxi careening at 140 km/h with a Miley Cyrus song blasting on loop. Our narrator fears for his life—‘it really does seem like nothing, oh nothing can save us at this point’—yet sings along, swept up in the moment. This is a lot like reading Scenes: you know something should happen, soon, something bad, but the song only repeats, again and again. Fairytales, folk legends, myths and tragedies ascend, descend or transcend. Querelle of Roberval knows this: ‘Querelle is Roberval’s bogeyman…he spirits away adolescents, corrupts them, carves them up, devours them,’ and he pays the price of his deal. (As queers, we make many deals and pay many prices.) Scenes reports from the underworld, but it never feels like much has been truly, deeply, irreparably, transformatively lost. 

—Sadie Graham