The Secret Voice
Short stories, translated from the French by Matt Cohen (Toronto:
Porcupine’s Quill, 1990). The John-Glassco Translation Award 1990, Ass. of Literary Translators of Canada.
This is an award-winning collection of ten short stories which all deal with the relationships of the characters to the law. The law has many facets: orders to follow, internalized principles we obey to without questioning, etc. These stories analyze what happens when one gets rid of its consciousness: a world of nonsense.
-Adrienne-Choquette Prize For Best Collection of Short Stories, 1981 (Quebec)
-France-Quebec Prize, Paris, 1983
-Short Listed, General Governor of Canada Award, Ottawa, 1982
-Selection as "Book of the month" by Nos livres (Quebec) (Cover, March 1983)
-This collection inspired the formation of a musical group from Manitoba in Canada: Les Surveillantes. www.lessurveillantes.com
Reviews' excerpts
"Some stories of this collection by Brulotte are among the best texts published in Quebec in 1982, simple, sober, nourished by an original and rich emotional intelligence." Rene Lapierre, Liberté, April 1983.
"Gaëtan Brulotte is one of those writers who have participated in a significant fashion to the recent evolution of Quebec short story. (… ) The Secret Voice is said to be an emblematic collection, which has contributed to give a formidable impulse to the genre." Francine Bordeleau, Montreal, Lettres québécoises 87 (1997), 14.
"Among the best collections since the beginning of the 80s" Jean-François Chassay, Spirale, March 1986.
"A collection of ten short stories of a rare quality. [...] A perfect mastery of short story writing. [...] Universal themes inspired from small but significant facts of daily life, an acute sense of irony [...] evident skills in text construction, intelligence of style [...] all make this collection of short stories a great achievement. The Secret Voice is a book that is at the same time solemn and funny, full of modern references which unveil with soberness and just a tremor the dramatic side of the contemporary world. This is a book that you must read." Noel Audet, Le Devoir (Montreal), Dec. 18, 1982
"It is certainly The Secret Voice by Gaëtan Brulotte which leads the way (...) this collection is a rupture and sets the tone, the future orientation that will take the genre. With minute detail Brulotte unearths the absurd, shams, even the totalitarian dimension hidden in apparent automatisms, social fights, and hierarchical relations. His characters well illustrate what we may call, following Freud, a "daily life psychopathology". But The Secret Voice tells emotional states rather than stories, Brulotte is not only in fiction but also in metafiction, and his texts seem to be reflecting on the writing process itself..." Marie Caron, Lettres québécoises, 2000, p. 39
"Some stories of this collection by Brulotte are among the best texts published in Quebec in 1982, simple, sober, nourished by an original and rich emotional intelligence." Rene Lapierre, Liberté, April 1983.
"Among the best collections since the beginning of the 80s" Jean-François Chassay, Spirale, March 1986.
"A collection of ten short stories of a rare quality. [...] A perfect mastery of short story writing. [...] Universal themes inspired from small but significant facts of daily life, an acute sense of irony [...] evident skills in text construction, intelligence of style [...] all make this collection of short stories a great achievement. The Secret Voice is a book that is at the same time solemn and funny, full of modern references which unveil with soberness and just a tremor the dramatic side of the contemporary world. This is a book that you must read to save time." Noel Audet, Le Devoir (Montreal), Dec. 18, 1982
"It is certainly The Secret Voice by Gaëtan Brulotte which paved the way (...) this collection brought a rupture and set the tone, the direction that the genre would take the genre in the future. With almost maniacal meticulousness Brulotte unearths the absurd and shams, even the totalitarian dimension concealed by apparent automatisms, social antagonisms, and hierarchical relationships. His characters illustrate well what we may call, following Freud, a "psychopathology of everyday life." However, The Secret Voice depicts emotional states rather than just telling stories. Brulotte is not only in fiction but also in metafiction, and his texts seem to reflect on the very process of writing itself..." Marie Caron, Lettres québécoises, 2000, p. 39
"Gaëtan Brulotte is one of those writers who have participated in a significant fashion to the recent evolution of Quebec short story. (… ) The Secret Voice is said to be an emblematic collection, which has contributed to give a formidable impulse to the genre." Francine Bordeleau, Montreal, Lettres québécoises 87 (1997), 14.
"This is why one could conclude that the "tranquil absurd" of Gaëtan Brulotte’s world is only tranquil in appearance. It basically expresses the concerns of the postmodern writer and brings back, in a new form with a minimalist and stripped language (J.-P. Boucher), tinged with irony and humor, the very question of meaning in its double hypostasis: sense of existence, sense of writing. It is also interesting to notice that Brulotte published an essay on writing entitled La Chambre des lucidités in 2003. As if, like Kafka, he wanted to suggest that writing means, above all, "to release hidden clarity". Gyurcsik, Margareta. "Kafka de Montréal." XYZ (Montreal) 96 (Winter 2008): 65-79.
"Reading the ten short stories collected in Le Surveillant shows the finesse and importance of the writing techniques revealed by the literary functions and processes present in the opening and the clausule of each short story. These techniques appear to be the meticulous operation of gears which in turn seduce, convince and appeal to a reader to whom Brulotte seems to attach great importance. This auctorial concern which we have been able to observe manifests itself in two stages. On one hand the opening of each story invites the reader to quickly enter a world which seems familiar to him through immediate dramatization and haptism - a process dear to the author - by creating a certain mimesis. On the other hand, we realize that the strongly accented closures do not often correspond to the more conservative ends of short stories of this period. With Brulotte, few ends in guillotine style, and because he remodeled the narrative conclusion, the author succeeded in upsetting the habits of short stories readers and thus pushing back their expectations." Bérubé, Estelle. Le surveillant : ouvertures et clausules [suivi de ] Attentes. MA thesis, McGill University, 2003.
"I had not read l'Emprise (Double Exposure). I therefore have the pleasure, a little late, of greeting today a writer, a real one, who knows how to write and who knows how to tell a story, who walks with remarkable ease in all the specimens of absurd that make up our world. [...] We sometimes laugh when reading Gaëtan Brulotte. It is never a frank laugh. Because the situations, even the most fanciful, in which he immerses his characters resemble by too many features to the ones we experience everyday so that we can’t help experiencing some discomfort. Things could really happen as he tells them. " Gilles Marcotte, L'Actualité, April 1983, 118
"...belongs to the literature of the absurd, depicts a universal truth: humans engage in senseless activity most of the time and try to make it appear purposeful by finding justification in bending human will and intelligence to the omniscience of an order, for no other reason than it has been given. (…) Sparkling passages (...) together with numerous penetrating insights, keep the reader's interest throughout." Thomas Brown, Québec Studies (Hanover, NH, USA) 3 (1985): 221-222.
"The ten stories of Le Surveillant exemplify various stages of both conceptual and emotive rhetoric, as well as the current of poetic language that not only can reunite intellect and emotion, but that rises above the attempt to influence and ultimately to control the human mind. (…) Although the collection ends on a note of hope, we must not underestimate the warning contained in the collection's title. 'Le Surveillant' enfolds not only the obvious noun phrase but also a disquieting participial construction whose object is imprecise, and whose subject is absent. [...] The threat of the possibility of extinguishing the human desire for freedom, decency, and meaning is always with us; it must be countered by perpetual vigilance." Ruth M. Mesavage "Conceptual Rhetoric and Poetic Language in Le Surveillant by Gaétan Brulotte," Quebec Studies (Hanover, NH, USA), 3(1985): 185, 201.
“(…) the collection rises above banality because of Gaëtan Brulotte’s ability to twist seemingly ordinary characters and what they do into absurd and bizarre contortions. Of the 10 stories in the book, most are written from a first-person perspective, though Brulotte does not impose his voice on the characters. Rather he allows them to speak for themselves, to piece together the fragments that form their unique worlds. (..) Brulotte (…) is a witty writer who focuses on the darker elements of everyday life and combines them with an equally dark subtlety and sense of humor.” Martin Waxman, The Globe and Mail, Sept. 15, 1990.
"Explores universals of contemporary life. (…) characters hear secret “voices” that direct and often ruin their lives: the voices of duty, of guilt, of custom and procedure, of professionalism. (…) In still other stories, the “voice” heard is not that of authority but of its opposites, freedom and imagination." Ronald Conrad, Canadian Book Review Annual, Dec 1991.
“Brulotte asserting himself from Le Surveillant as one of the most original short story writer of our time. Critics have often confirmed it. The tone, the posture reminds Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett by the tendency to flush out the absurd in the systems which surround and alienate modern human beings. There is no imitation, however, since Brulotte strives to parody everything, the real as the fictitious, madness as reason and all types of discourse. The only thing that remains the same during this quarter century of fiction work is the writing, which is unchanged in the classic sense of the term, a writing which could be compared to that of a Stendhal who would have frequented Lautréamont, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Sigmund Freud, André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes and who would have fun thwarting all aesthetics, firing any wood.” Michel Lord, « Gaëtan Brulotte : l’écriture de la folie et de la transgression des genres » in Brèves implosions narratives. La nouvelle québécoise 1940-2000. Montréal, Nota Bene, 2009, 159-160.
"In conclusion, the value of Brulotte's writings is in their diagnostic capacity: the author is an analyst of the human condition, as regards to temporality. His merit is to have created characters who, from different ways, are in conflict with this insurmountable situation and are overcome. The escape from temporality, in its fundamental orientations, not being possible, there remains the tragic consciousness of being in time, the dramatic struggle between man and his condition. In Brulotte's works, this conflict is very well represented. The escape routes are not capable of solving the problem, because still too human. As with Camus, the Immanence is tragic, and the world is fundamentally absurd because it is unfair thanks to the bloody mathematics of death. Perhaps, as Heidegger said in an interview with Der Spiegel "to this point only a God can save us", but for Brulotte’s characters, as this God has not revealed himself, they therefore remain in the struggle." Antonio Rinaldis, Philosopher 27 (2013): 76.
"The places are neither named nor included in a realistic process; it suffices to know that it is a wall, an ultra-modern building, a street, a holiday resort by the sea. Each of these places, then, is fully playing its thematic function of obstructive bulwark, inextricable maze, or place of all contradictions. Representation matters less than this thematic function at the service of the absurd. Brulotte excels at this diversion. (…) There is in this collection a strong thematic coherence around alienation, a great unity of form and inspiration." André Carpentier, "Le Surveillant", in Dictionnaire des œuvres littéraires du Québec. T VII (1981-1985), Montréal, Fidès, 2003, 865
"Gaétan Brulotte is undoubtedly one of the best young authors whose work has been awarded a prize" (...) Confronted with the insane of the Order, the characters get involved so intensely, with logic and nonsense so absolute that they end up in spite of themselves bypassing the Law or at least blocking its workings. (...) It is this coincidence of the very brief interrogation and of a fatal abolition of being that makes all the power of these texts. The use of the short story allows Brulotte to make us participate in an unbearable lightness rather than an escalation of depth." Francine Bordeleau, Nuit Blanche 23 ( mai-juin 1986), 33
"There is rhythm, it is written for the ear. There are colors, it is written for the eyes. There is incisive observation and disturbing humor, it is written for the mind." Raymonde L. Leclerc, L'hebdo de Trois-Rivières, 5 mars 1985, 3.
"The author of The Secret Voice came out of the collective Quebec universe and set out in search of a universal experience. He perfectly embodies the new Quebec state of mind: opening up to the world. (.. .) Le Surveillant is a work of undeniable quality and demonstrates all the refinement and subtlety of a professional and serious author " Cheryl Demharter, The French Review (USA), avr. 1984.
"A good collection of short stories. Small short proses, gently ironic, cruelly true. Always a little below or beyond the event. [...] The universes here in mentioned compose a sort of kaleidoscope of the contemporary world." Réjean Beaudoin, Liberté, juin 1987,104-105
"There are no frills [...] You will have a good laugh, not always, but often. And it reads well." Jean Malo, "Tout sur tout", CHLT TV, Sherbrooke (QC), le 13 janv. 1983.
"An impressive roadmap. Margins who look like everyone [...] We find ourselves in short stories like the Sentry, the Sweeper, the Exalted One. [...] In the Sentry, we recognize the style of the author, his sophisticated, precise, original writing, his thoroughness in developing his characters ... " Louis-Marie Lapointe, Progrès-Dimanche, Chicoutimi (QC), 26 déc. 1982.
"Well written; often bitter lucidity." Paul Mancel, Le Devoir, Montréal, 4 déc. 1982.
"I am the man of the desert" claims the painter of unforgiving spaces and arid experiences, the writer of the excessive states of the earth's crust and the human soul. This man from the desert is Gaétan Brulotte. [his] Sentry is also a man of the desert. " Régis Tremblay, Le Soleil, Québec, 29 janv. 1983, D-3.
"Gaétan Brulotte never considered his life or his profession lightly. [...] He always chose the most difficult, the most demanding paths." Pierrette Roy, La Tribune, Sherbrooke (QC), 15 janv. 1983, B-3.
"Gaétan Brulotte is very skillful and his skill mirrors his writing style which is very beautiful, which is elegantly crafted, and meticulous. [...] It is perhaps the theme of freedom which could bring together the ten short stories in The Secret Voice. [...] I have the impression that we cannot find in Quebec literature a filiation with Gaétan Brulotte’s short stories. " Michelle Roy, CKRL FM, Quebec, Jan 26, 1983.
"G. Brulotte is a formidable observer of all forms of alienation, subtle or coarse. His short stories are short but disturbing forays into the land of the absurd [...] G. Brulotte found a laconic or ironic tone which suits his stories very well. The writing is neat, precise, perfectly mastered. " André Berthiaume, Livres et auteurs québécois, Presses de l'Université Laval, 1982, 36-37.
"You have to be a deep human being to write this kind of texts. And your written language is very beautiful. [...] In your texts, in my opinion, there is all that, there is dance, there is has choreography, of course there is the actor side, the theater, it is also cinema, it is television, it is radio. Something quite rare! After thirty-one years of professional experience, I can say now: it’s very rare! And that’s since the first time I’ve acted your texts. " Julien Bessette, actor, Radio-Canada, March 1981; Grimoire, Sherbrooke (QC), Nov 1981, 20-21
"This collection of short stories is certainly worth reading. It makes us think, seduces us, moves us, and that, in an admirable style. [...] Gaétan Brulotte is undoubtedly a good writer. Really good. [ ...] There are talents that never deceive. " Claude Wintgens, Image de la Mauricie 7.6 (March 1983), 29.
"Gaétan Brulotte likes to experience novelty, originality and, fundamentally, strangeness. Like the surrealists, he finds something unusual in the most basic daily life. He likes to surprise its mysteries, its excessiveness and its deviance [...] Behind all this, there is also a reassuring / disturbing melee with the forbidden. And each time a feast for the eyes. Each time a foray into the most obscure, but also the richest parts of the human soul. And surely all the carnal density of an exceptional writing. " Gérald Gaudet, L'échange, Trois-Rivières, mai 1981, 1.
"Ten texts of remarkable conciseness. Ten short forays into a daily life that quickly becomes ours thanks to the precision and sobriety of a very effective writing." Paul-André Bourque, Au masculin, août 1983, 31.
"The author's writing is sober and serves well the absurd, the anxiety and the loneliness that the characters embody. Reading is never boring because the author knows how to look for the unusual hidden behind everyday platitudes. " Raymond Martin, Moebius 17 (Printemps 1983), 92.
"A different, refined, colorful writing, a little bit fantastic and elegantly put off. [...] All under the guise of humor [...] a humor that is both subtle and irreverent. A French language skillfully conducted. [...] A very nice little book. " Normand Desjardins, Nos livres, mars 1983, 15
"Gaétan Brulotte is a novelist who will leave a lasting mark in our literature. He practices the economy of words when waste is in fashion. No slag or complacency as accumulated sometimes by beginners or even professional writers. He prefers shorthand to talkative sprawl, discretion and modesty over provocation. [...] as we progress in reading this book, there emerges a kind of liberation through writing and poetry. [...] It ends in beauty and sweetness. It is also the art of the short story. Leaving a memory that can turn into a dream. Building a world in a few words and watching it vibrate, and transform itself for a few minutes, for a few pages. " Madeleine Ouellette-Michalska, Livres et auteurs québécois, janv.1983.
"We are here in full action literature. [...] There are genuine short stories. It really does not seem like reading short novels. There is this condensation, and I insist really on the word, this condensation which makes a short story of fifteen pages a total situation, a cosmos which seems complete. [...] Gaétan Brulotte's writing is meticulous, [...] capable of serial development. [...] This is not Gaétan Brulotte's next books you shall read, it's this one." Gilles Pellerin, Book Club, Radio Canada FM, 24 janv. 1983.
"This is an important problem that Gaétan Brulotte raises in this book. [...] Gaétan Brulotte succeeded in a humorous fashion one of the great philosophical tales of our time, capable of making us reflect on the meaning of life, and on work." Jean Sarrazin, La vie quotidienne, radio de Radio Canada, 8 déc. 1982
"The quiet force of the absurd. [...] We recognize in it [in The Secret Voice] the author's manner: a good mastery of his means of expression and the optimal adequacy of writing and the subject . [...] [M. Brulotte] managed to give his ten short stories, however very different, a unit of inspiration which drives away this impression of chosen pieces that often leave collections of short stories. These are good quality short stories. " Réginald Martel, La Presse, Montréal, 12 fév. 1983, D-3
"A funny and serious book at the same time [...] an exceptional mastery." André Gaudreault, Le Nouvelliste, Trois-Rivières (QC), 5 fév. 1983, 14-A
"Brulotte's collection is written in an impeccable language which often matches the situation described: short, jerky sentences, concise style. Isn't this rare economy of means the quality of a good writer? Brulotte has talent. We are waiting for the rest of his work, which was well launched with the Robert Cliche Prize, because he has things to say and knows how to say them well. " Aurélien Boivin, Québec français, mars 1983, 3
"A dozen short stories with a slightly treacherous charm. Gaétan Brulotte is an ironist. [...] The baits of these little literary traps are numerous: finesse, a certain humor, a very correct and even elegant style, a narrative text that is coherent and very pleasant to read [...] Casually, Gaétan Brulotte proceeds to systematic demystifications and reveals the absurdity of situations and the unconsciousness of individuals. " Gilles Cossette, Lettres québécoises 29 (Printemps 1983).
"It is not easy to give a collection of short stories a homogeneous finish both in terms of writing and in terms of theme. With the Secret Voice, Gaétan Brulotte has achieved this. [...] All these figures, all these situations speak definitively of loss and lack, in short, of desire. What Brulotte seems to bring into play, by a sort of exacerbation of the law and its corollaries, is quite a concern of modernity All of this is being done on the sly, with an economy of means reminiscent of Beckett and Kafka." Marcel Labine, Spirale, Montréal, mars 1983, 3
"The writing is beautiful, elegant, sensual. In a few words the characters gain density, become real. They are both vain and tragic, ridiculous and passionate." Christiane Laforge, Le Quotidien de Chicoutimi (Québec), 24 déc. 1982, 13
more critical excerpts...