On a crumbling estate isolated from everything, two kids exist alongside their father. This guy isn't just dad - he's God, master, tyrant all rolled into one. He controls knowledge, makes the rules, decides reality. The kids learn to read from Saint-Simon's memoirs and Spinoza's Ethics. That's it. That's their whole world - until one morning they find him hanging in his bedroom.
"It's horrible how beautiful it is"
That line sums up this entire novel. Nothing else comes close to what Soucy pulls off here. The style is unreal because he completely reinvents how language works:
"Words don't serve speech well when they wobble loose from the handle after the axe."
He builds this atmosphere that sits somewhere between reality and fantasy - it's not quite either. We're not reading a novel anymore. This is a tale that works on multiple levels, shot through with dark humor.
First layer: universal story. Father dies, family explodes, everyone scrambles to rebuild their world and figure out who they actually are. Classic stuff.
Second layer: family nightmare. Why do these people live cut off from everything? The secrets leak out gradually as the young narrator pieces together memory fragments and confronts what actually happened. What we discover - especially how ignorant these children were kept - genuinely disturbs me.
Third layer: philosophical parable. God is dead. Humans inherit crushing guilt. Without religion, we discover mortality's terror - but also freedom, desire, knowledge itself.
This book unsettles you. It confuses you. It gets under your skin. But the moment you finish, you want to start over because one read can't possibly catch all the mysteries, all the twisted pathways, all the implications buried in here.
Boréal, 1998. - 180 pages.