Jean-Paul Dubois

Paul Hansen, a former apartment-building supervisor, is sharing a cell in a Montreal prison with the notoriously scary Hell's Angels gang-leader Patrick Horton. We're not told the nature of Hansen's offence until the end of the book, but he's clearly quite a different type from his cellmate, and a lot of the interest of the book is in watching the development of a friendship between the two men. Meanwhile, Hansen delves into his memory and looks back at those who mattered to him: his French mother, who ran an independent cinema in Toulouse; his Danish father, protestant pastor and descendant of a long line of Skagen fishermen; his wife Winona, an Irish-Algonquin bush pilot; his friend Kieran Read, an insurance adjuster whose job is to find out bad things about deceased people; and his dog Nouk. All of them existing at different angles to the universe.

There's a lot of information here. We learn a good deal about French cinema of the fifties and sixties, Harley-Davidsons and eccentric European cars, about flying the DHC-2 Beaver, the maintenance of lawns and swimming-pools, prison food, asbestos mining, Skagen sand-dunes, organ music, casinos and race-courses, and much else. And it's not always easy to see what it all adds up to, or how it maps onto the inner lives of the characters. In the end, I think it was a kind of French/Canadian take on Nevil Shute's Trustee from the toolroom, a novel about a man who seems to be fully wrapped up in the mechanical world, but who turns out to have a limit to the amount of senseless destruction of human happiness he can tolerate.… (mais)

PREMIO GONCOURT 2019. El premio literario más importante de Francia.Paul Hansen lleva dos años cumpliendo condena en la prisión provincial de Montreal. Comparte celda con Horton, un Ángel del Infierno encarcelado por asesinato.Rebobinemos: Hansen es el encargado del Excelsior, un edificio residencial donde ejerce sus talentos de conserje, vigilante y factótum y, lo que es más, repara almas y consuela al afligido. Cuando no está ayudando a los vecinos del Excelsior o realizando tareas de mantenimiento de las instalaciones, pasa el tiempo con Winona, su compañera, en cuyo aeroplano suben juntos el cielo y vuelan por encima de las nubes. Pero las cosas no tardan en cambiar. Al Excelsior llega un nuevo gerente y, con él, los conflictos. Hasta que sucede lo inevitable.… (mais)