Never without her

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Jocelyne Saucier at the Eden Mills Writers' Festival, Guelph 2015

A novel by the Canadian author Jocelyne Saucier is never without her . It was first published in French in 1999 under the title Les héritiers de la mine (The heirs of the mine) and was translated into German by Sonja Finck and Frank Weigand in 2019 . It is about an extended family in Quebec , whose children scattered around the world after an underground explosion in the 1960s.

construction

In seven chapters six of the 20 adult children describe their growing up together and an accident in an underground mine . They call the place Norco, an abbreviation for "Northern Consolidated", the fictional mine operator NorCo.

The 7 chapters are separated by a page break. The reader recognizes the speaker on the first page of a chapter. The children name each other with nicknames, only the parents address them with their baptismal name. Many children have two different names in the book. In a supporting story, three decades after the family split up, children and parents meet again for the first time at a congress of Canadian ore prospectors in 1995.

Matz, Denis, pp. 7-32

Matz, the youngest, got his nickname because he was considered a weakling. In 1995 he remembers his childhood, right next to the ore mining shaft, a zinc mine . One of the siblings always looked after him so that he would not get lost in the wild adventures in the field. He remembers most clearly that the children saw themselves in stark contrast to the other residents of the small town, whom they called "country eggs".

Matz reports that Geronimo is introduced to ore mining by his father when he is 13 or 14 years old. The father makes himself scarce for the children, he only lives in the basement for exploring the ores and for his stone collection. The few moments when he spoke to a child will be remembered for a long time. Geronimo is the exception, because his father gives him a thorough introduction to archaeological studies. At the 1995 Congress, the memory of every child is brought back to life. The father is to receive a medal, he is 81 years old, the mother 87 years. Matz now asks the loudest about the past. The rest of the children feel uncomfortable in various ways because there are only 20 of them. Why the 21st child disappeared is the theme of the novel.

Jeanne d'Arc, Émilienne, pp. 33-68

She is the eldest of the daughters. She wants to hide the secret that tore the family as long as possible, especially from the curious Matz. He won't leave us alone. But don't worry, nobody told him. (P. 66)

In the family she had been taking care of the newborns since she was six years old. "Their" first such babies were the twins , the girls Tommy and Angèle. She was also very busy with the rest of the housework.

“She (the mother) loved us. All you had to do was see the tender looks she gave her babies before she confided them to me. But their love couldn't stand the hustle and bustle with which they rushed into the kitchen. She forgot the baby, forgot us all, one by one, each and every one of us, because of the headless love she felt for all of us, for the entirety of her children. "

- p. 49

Jeanne d'Arc finally wants to solve the riddle about her parents, especially about her father. He then hid his personality by being obsessed with ores and stones. Her mother, too, was a mystery to her, just as she was completely absorbed in cooking. Jeanne d'Arc mourns the old days, she sees her family drawn by the pain for her missing sister. She says her mother doesn't know anything about the missing one.

Tommy, Carmelle (1), pp. 69-115

Tommy is one of the two identical twin girls; the missing Angèle was the other.

“We were five years old when the McDougall and her bloated husband put their smelly feet in our house. I will never forget the day. They burst our soap bubble, it is their fault that Angèle and I began to differ from each other. ... She (the woman) bared her teeth, yellow witch teeth, and never let us out of her sight. Angèle and I sat at the other end of the table, which is why the witch's venomous gaze never escaped anyone. ... We were so close, we were so deeply connected, how could I have known that while I was sharpening my claws, by the McDougall without resistance? "

- p. 75

Tommy shared her feelings with this sister very vividly, even if she sometimes lived further away, there was a transfer of thoughts and feelings between the two, and so she had felt Angèle's death as immediately as if she were standing by. Today she hates the secrets about it. Nor does she feel called to be the first to lift the veil. Tommy remembers the eldest sister as domineering, mainly because she forced her to slip into the role of twin sister on the day of the explosion in order to mislead the villagers. To this day she sometimes feels Angèle's presence, her “shadow”, as if through telepathy.

The twins had been very different at the time, about what they expected from life. During the holidays, Angèle often traveled to the wealthy McDougalls in Montréal and later attended a higher school at their expense. She liked to dress in expensive clothes, frilly clothes, even in Norco, whereupon some brothers, especially Geronimo, bullied her and forced her to get dirty in them. The two girls also often talked about what "happiness" and "beauty" meant to them.

El Torro, Lucien, pp. 116-137

El Torro was 13 years old at the time of the explosion. He remembers pretty well the deception that was staged back then. Soon after, he realized that Angèle had been killed. His mind wanders back to the day before the accident, when his father instructed a brother on the occasion of his birthday how to handle dynamite. All the children had traveled, and for the last time the popular discussions took place in a large group. In the flashback, El Torro also highlights the rifts that separated his family from “the others” in the village: we strived for absolute fulfillment, for uncompromising truth, the country eggs, on the other hand, only wanted their jobs.

The Patriarch, Émilien, pp. 138-184

Émilien is the oldest child. When he emigrated to Australia, it became more and more clear to him that his family suffering had driven him to the other end of the world. I broke up with my family. (P. 139) Eventually he ended up in an abandoned mining town, Kalgoorlie-Boulder , feeling like he had come home. When the Mount Charlotte mine closed, what remained was a ghost town surrounded by the same poor mining settlements that Norco had been. His escape from Canada had been in vain; Everywhere he would meet Tommy's pain-tormented face, as he remembers it when she “escaped” from Norco.

Looking back on his stranded life, he has become a gambler, Émilien comments on the family man Albert. He was more of a scholar than a ranger. Albert has his say: how he was the first to discover the zinc mine and then he was financially set up by the NorCo company. As taciturn as he was at home, he was talkative in the forest. He was a hero to the children. It was only after the shutdown of the mine that an irrepressible anger grew within them, which was directed primarily at the other residents of the boomtown , people who were just as poor as we were . Geronimo became the leader of the fight against the villagers. The children fought violent power struggles among themselves, it was about their hierarchy and about small privileges.

After NorCo's father had been betrayed, he had explored layers of rock on his own in the mine and came across gold. He then dismantled that for years and marketed it illegally.

Geronimo, Laurent, pp. 185-225

Geronimo works as a surgeon in theaters of war around the world. He knows that he wants to avoid the nightmare that haunts him over Angel's death and that he is fleeing from his family. In the flashback, he thinks of one day going down the tunnel with Angèle, for her for the first time. He wanted to break their will, get to the core of their resistance to the harsh customs among the siblings. Twenty years later he came back to Norco for the first time, but felt nothing but internal turmoil. He visited the brother Tim. Geronimo came to rest in his poor forest hut. They talked about the time after the explosion: Norco was soon a dead place, like any abandoned boomtown. Geronimo remembers how after the explosion he got Tommy to pretend she was Angèle under the eyes of the hated country eggs. However, after a short distance she refused to continue driving at the covered bridge and got out. The two brothers who were also present have no idea what Angèle had brought into the shaft.

In any case, Geronimo feels guilty for taking Angèle down the shaft with him. She would never have been able to get there on her own, he says.

Tommy, Carmelle (2), pp. 226-254

Tommy feels the hall in which the ore seekers honor her father today like a prison, because here she cannot avoid her siblings. Matz can no longer stand the tension and irritates the crowd when he addresses Tommy with "Angèle". The provocation works, the mother teaches him that she died in the shaft. The mother gives us back the truth . She asks Carmelle to describe what happened now. Jeanne d'Arc is not at all happy about that, as she had forced the disguised "Angèle" to leave. Tommy goes so far as to internally blame Jeanne d'Arc for death (p. 237). The old taboo weighs heavily on her. She had seen her twin die as if she had been in the tunnel herself, she had screamed too when Angèle screamed in fear.

Nobody except Tommy understands why Angèle went into the mine. A stark contrast had determined their lives, on the one hand there were these rich strangers in Montréal, on the other hand the solidarity in their lower-class family. She had heard how important it was to Geronimo and Tim that the shaft be made inaccessible in order to hide the predatory gold mining forever.

At the turning point, Angèle had asked with chosen words: I don't want anyone to take my place away from me instead of reciting the usual joking phrase. In a figurative sense, this also meant that no one should question their position among the siblings. But they were absolutely silent, including Tommy, who still feels guilty about it today. Her twin sister found herself left alone in the group, she went over and brought the shaft to collapse. The two brothers had been close to it but hadn't triggered the explosion. Geronimo was mistaken. Angèle sacrificed herself on the family altar.

Historical

The setting of the novel, called Norco, is now called Barville, a remote part of the village of Barraute, north of Val-d'Or . At that time the mine was called “Barvue” and there were both open-cast and underground tunnels. Barville is located in the Cadillac Trench , also known as the Abitibi Greenstone Belt , a well-known large, very ancient rock formation that contains many ores. Historical associations in the area have repeatedly published pictures and texts on ore mining in the trench, and many photographs of the time have been put online. Although there is still some degradation today, its peak is long gone. Many places share the fate of "Norco" as a lost boomtown. It is also noteworthy that nowadays companies are trying to analyze the data obtained at that time by means of modern IT to find those places where mining would be economically profitable, especially gold and silver deposits in the entire Cadillac trench.

Of the numerous subjects in pictures from Barville, the following are addressed in the novel: the modern center school (instead of a small, old village school, of which there is also a picture) and the covered bridge , "Pont couvert de Barville", over the river Laflamme where Tommy leaves the car where the siblings put them to camouflage. There are covered bridges like this all over Canada, especially in the northern area with a lot of snow, and quite a few are still in operation. There are hundreds of such images on the net. The main purpose of the roof was to ensure that the bridge could be used safely in winter and that it would not collapse under a load of ice and snow. In addition, the roof made the wooden planks that form the roadway last longer.

The “Pont couvert de Barville” is sometimes also called “St. Blaise ”because Catholicism used to be the prevailing worldview in the area.

Awards

  • Prix ​​France-Quebec, nominated 2001

Reviews

  • Sieglinde Geisel: The dream of radical self-sufficiency, NZZ am Sonntag , August 25, 2019, p. 10 (fiction)

Appreciations and interpretations

  • The real peculiarity of the novel consists in the originality of the plot, in the effective dramatic structure and in the beautiful, lyrical expression. ... I content myself with recommending this witty novel without reservation, as fluent as it is written, so extremely beautiful, one could weigh it in gold. Stanley Péan, La Presse
  • With its "explosive" plot, which is poignant, comical and tragic at the same time, you don't forget the characters involved so quickly. "Les héritiers de la mine" is a great novel ... Using the example of the fate of this extended family, the author of Abitibi , her permanent residence, tells of the dreams of the family members and how the dreams vanish, of their betrayed workers, of the ruthless power of multinational corporations , of the disappearance of places, of families wiping out themselves. Your protagonists are made of the stuff of heroes, they have what it takes to withstand all hardships; they may just be "local" heroes, but their struggle is global. Marie-Claude Fortin, "Voir" magazine, 2000, excerpt.
  • Quickly translated ... Sonja Finck and Frank Weigand, who, in view of the family idiom, demonstrate inventiveness. Even if some passages explain a lot and the author puts it on in a really thick way: Saucier first succeeds in fooling the reader into a cheeky, free life and then gradually leading him into his dark heart - a grandiose ride in hell that stirs curiosity for more. Bender, FAZ
  • A novel about a misfortune, the riddle of which is only solved at the very end ... You tell retrospectively about your childhood ... As in "One Life More" ... Saucier also uses a gripping language in "Never without her" that the reader inevitably translates into a earthbound, wild, tender and in places very brutal world. This creates tension right up to the last page. Josef Braun: Jocelyne Saucier and the Canadian wilderness , in Kreuzer "Logbuch", supplement to the Leipzig Book Fair , March 2019, p. 40
  • The framework narrative is slightly reminiscent of "The riddle of the limited group of perpetrators" (sc. In many crime novels). Just like the history of the Cardinal clan, the hotel ( sc. The family reunion) forms a "labyrinth of corridors and pretenses" ... so that the reader expects that a corpse will soon be found. The novel unfolds in a compelling way with the help of six cardinal voices, and in Mullin's translation each of these six voices presents itself in a special way, with small differences in tone and style, showing different angles and personalities. The riddle at the center of the novel comes gradually into view ... which leads to a tense narrative flow ... Therefore it is disappointing that the 7th, the last chapter, seems to be the most hard-working. Like Hercule Poirot with Agatha Christie , Saucier cannot fail to gather all the characters in a final act in order to reveal the long-suspected truth. Even if many readers welcome this conclusion, the whole structure appears melodramatic in an untypical way. The “moral of the story” is applied quite thick. Fortunately, this weakness is outweighed by the many strengths of the novel.
  • "I think we had declared war on the whole world," remembers Tommy ... (To Angèle) we experience the drama of the gifted child, which consists in the child having to betray either himself or the family ... Everything here is larger than life, because Jocelyne Saucier creates a mythical space, along with the abysmal humor that belongs to the myth. It is the original myth of North America that Saucier continues to write in her novels. Your characters dream of radical anarchy in the "wilderness", away from civilization. (In the book) ... the Cardinals say: "We are like no one else, we created ourselves." ... You have become entangled in a web of lies, responsibility, guilt and "silence that weighs tons".
  • This burning north: two books by Jocelyne Saucier , by Petr Kyloušek. The two novels Les héritiers de la mine and Il pleuvait des oiseaux are both set in Abitibi and in northern Ontario. Both deal with murderous fires, and in both cases the fire serves as a symbol, (as a) religious image. The term "fire" is a structural element of both novels in various ways.

expenditure

in German
in foreign languages
  • Original: Les héritiers de la mine . Éditions XYZ, Montréal 1999 (frequent revisions); Gallimard-Denoël, Paris 2015 a. ö.

Web links

literature

Historical environment
  • Wilfred WL Weber: Barvue mine, Quebec , in Canadian Institute for mining and metallurgy, Geology division, Ed .: Structural geology of Canadian ore deposits , Vol. 2, 1957, pp. 419-422

notes

  1. ↑ Also called Julienne
  2. ↑ Here, No. 61-01-04
  3. ↑ Le véritable intérêt de "Les héritiers de la mine" réside dans l'originalité de l'intrigue, l'efficacité de la construction dramatique et la beauté lyrique du style.… Je me bornerai donc à vous recommander sans réserve ce roman inspiré, à l'écriture fluid et fort belle, qui vaut son pesant d'or.
  4. ↑ Avec son histoire explosive, poignante, drôle et tragique, ses personnages qui ne se laissent pas oublier, Les héritiers de la mine est un roman d'envergure… À travers le destin de cette grande famille, l'auture parle de l'Abitibi , ou elle habite toujours, et de ses rêves émiettes, de ses travailleurs floués, du pouvoir aveugle des grandes multinationales, de la disparation de villages, des familles qui se déciment. Ses protagonistes ont l'étoffe des héros, ils son taillé pour résister from rigueurs; ce sont des héros "locaux", peut-être, mais leur combat est universel. The magazine "Voir. Magazine culturel" was last published in print in Canada in February 2019, with issues for both Montréal and Quebec; since then there has been an Internet edition. Review by Fortin , French.
  5. ↑ Excerpt from the review by Niklas Bender: Search for gold and let it crack every now and then. An anarchic family clan is stirring up the Canadian wilderness. FAZ , literature and non-fiction, April 9, 2019
  6. ↑ Kreuzer Leipzig 2019
  7. ↑ cf. English Wikipedia : "Closed circle of suspects"
  8. ↑ The reviewer is unsure whether this is possibly due to the translation, as she only knows the English version.
  9. ↑ Tina Northrup: double review immoderate Families in Canadian Literature - canadienne Littérature , CanLit, special issue Emerging Scholars. # 226, autumn 2015, pp. 156 - 157 engl. on-line
  10. ↑ Sieglinde Geisel, NZZ on Sunday, August 25, 2019, p. 10
  11. ↑ Deux romans de Jocelyne Saucier, Les héritiers de la mine (1999) et Il pleuvait des oiseaux (2011), sont situés dans l'Abitibi et le nord de l'Ontario et les deux se placent sous le signe d'un feu meurtrier . Dans les deux cas, le feu prend une valeur symbolique, sous-tendue de l'imaginaire religieux. La thématique est examinée comme élément structurant à différents niveaux de la narration. The author also regards the explosion as a fire. Source , print: This North on Fire: Les héritiers de la mine and Il pleuvait des oiseaux by Jocelyne Saucier . In: Beyond the 49th Parallel: Many Faces of the Canadian North / Au-dela du 49e parallele: multiples visages du Nord canadien. CACS / AEEC Masarykova univerzita , Brno 2018 ISBN 9788021091924 pp. 97-107