Eric Dupont, Songs For The Cold Of Heart. Published by QC Fiction, 2018.
Canadians love stories. If they didn’t tell them, there wouldn’t be a Canada today. “” Eric Dupont, Songs For The Cold Of Heart
Writer: Michael Zarathus-Cook
The last time I laboured this much over a Canadian story was Conrad Black’s Rise To Greatness: History of Canada——yes yes the man is horrible but he sure knows how to make a thousand pages of Canadian history fly at the pace of a short story. Plus I was desperate. I needed a uniquely Canadian story, or at least a story about Canada, and there it was, a recently published whopper whose index read like a travel itinerary for a grand tour of the country. This time around what I needed more from a book had just as much to do with wanting a uniquely Canadian story as with continuing my streak of french authors and their incomparable talent for weaving bizarre plotlines from the seemingly plain sights of rural life variously assembled around a dingy parish. Enter Eric Dupont’s Songs For The Cold Of Heart, a French-Canadian ‘modern day Tosca’. It’s an exhausting read. It exhausts not merely because of its length but also because its subjects of choice are inexhaustible: unrequited love, family, religion, the ghastliness of the horrors of the twentieth century——which much of our present century might in the best case be merely a long recovery from.
I was also looking for a story about music, and this book is tamped to the brim with it, cover to cover. In fact I don’t think I’ve read a more decidedly musical novel than this one. At nearly six hundred pages, some measures seem to have been taken to ensure the reader’s auxiliary satisfaction should the main——and magnificently convoluted——storyline not be their cup of tea. For one, if you’re looking for a particularly long-winded introduction to the hyper-dramatic plot of Puccini’s Tosca——jackpot. If you’re looking for points of interest east of Montreal on your next trip to Quebec, this book reads as something of an atlas of that storied province. And, if you’re not so much looking for stories about a place, but about a people, and their resilience in spite of place, then I think the main storylines will do just fine.
The degree to which I’m ready to openly gush about this book probably removes my commentary from the cold impersonal realm of a review, so be it, I cannot recommend this book enough. Admittedly their is doubtless some proximity bias at play here, any book that at any point makes reference to Bloor Street has earned my irrevocable devotion regardless of whatever blunders it commits.
But there are of course other things at play here, namely Dupont’s interaction, through the lives of his characters, with the religious experience. There is usually no easier access for me to nearly comatose REM sleep than the mention of awe at the phenomena of religious experiences; but should the conversation shift instead to what it is the religious experience is a placeholder for, that state of being for which religion is a pitstop, then suddenly 600 pages flies by without turbulence——I’m all ears.
And that is where music plays a huge role in this book. I for one am convinced that the place religion holds in the hearts of many, it attains only by outcompeting other viable subjects of devotion that might otherwise be sufficient. Foremost, in my experience, is music. On its own religion is always a couple yards shy of a touchdown into the spiritual endzone of a potential convert, certain measures are needed to bridge the gap: loss of a loved one, sudden onsets of existential confusion, the final resort after several attempts to ‘pull oneself together’ and so on. But perhaps we’ve underestimated how significant a role music plays in spiritual crunchtime, the fourth-and-down moments of the soul. A well placed hymn can work wonders to bridge those extra yards that have hitherto remained out of reach on account of reason and pride——two of the three heads of the cerberus of atheism (Nietzsche is perhaps the third, ha!). And so it happens that many a times the power and spiritual force of the musical experience, a legitimate competitor for all varieties of sacred space within and without, is mistaken for the hand and grace of the almighty.
Now wouldn’t it be absolutely splendid if a book held the musical and religious experiences as equals, allowing the two forces to duel it out over 600 pages, most of which are set in a little town northeast of Montreal? What a bargain.
That is by no means all that Dupont has set up here. He takes music and religion as separate phenomena, and in the case of the former, displays his sweet obsession with the art...
It’s difficult to describe a voice [...] it’s easier to describe the impact it has, the images it invokes within us. [...] His voice became a character in my waking dreams, a sonorous entity which permeated every corner of my conscience. That voice was almost blue in colour; it quietened all the other sounds in my dreams “” Eric Dupont, Songs For The Cold Of Heart
Despite all of the above, there is very little that is cerebral about this novel. In fact Dupont makes plenty of space for plenty of hilarity with sequences like this:
“Rome, October 1, 1999
Go get fucked, Gabriel. Or rather, don’t.”
And then, in a seemingly better mood later on, another such handwritten letter begins:
“Rome, October 14, 1999
My dear Gabriel,...”
Aside from the concepts it explores, the book is laudable as well for it’s technical experiments in storytelling (I’m afraid I can’t give an example without risking a spoiler). For one, it’s a bit hard to place it in a genre-box: the best I can do is describe it as historical fiction peppered with some magical realism——historical surrealism? Genres be damned, however, this novel would be moreso hampered than understood by classification. An instance of his technical experiments is that of the narrative style: Dupont sets up a precariously high game of jenga in the first third of the book; thereafter he takes a step away from the development, only for new characters to emerge, each of them destined to remove their own piece from this bizarre three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle of a story. The reader, in turn, is occasionally left as the sole spectator, left to wince and cringe in anticipation of the collapse of this teetering tale. These characters, unaware of the awesome and improbable history which they inherit, are likes bull in Dupont’s china-shop.
Another notable instance——moreso hybrid of concept and technique——is the chances that Dupont takes with his approach to the age-old unit of the family. Every human story is a story about family——is an axiom I subscribe to, whether that is the family one is born into or one creates is a mere detail. Dupont seems to subscribe to a similar belief in this book. Aside, beneath, and above everything else, this is a story about a family. However much we may cherish or resent our experience of family, the story of the family is and will always be, the greatest story ever told. In light of that, the only consolation for those who are in that respect unfortunate, the cold of hearts, is the utter malleability and fortunately elastic definition of what it means to make a family. There are no other vectors in human life through which so great a saga as the one Dupont dreams up here can unfold; no other unit of association through which the roiling chaos of individual human life could be organized into a cohesive lineage.
This book had been loitering unread on my desk for the past four months but school and other similarly bogus excuses kept it at bay. So I made it my mission in the last ten days of the year to daily take 60-page bites out of it and have it done with before the decade was over. I couldn’t be more grateful that this was the book to break the dry spell of fiction in my reading list. Now I’m taking the new year as an opportunity to get my head back into similarly cathartic reads. Liu Zhenyun’s I Did Not Kill My Husband, which I’ve wanted to read since watching the film that it inspired two years ago seems promising. But if you’re looking for a long read through the indoor-days of January or February, Eric Dupont’s Songs For The Cold Of Heart is time well spent.
I give it a very high 4.92 stars out of whatever.