Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Death of Marlon Brando: A Novel
    The Death of Marlon Brando: A Novel
    The Death of Marlon Brando: A Novel
    Ebook117 pages1 hour

    The Death of Marlon Brando: A Novel

    By Pierre Gobeil

    ()

    Read preview
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateSep 5, 2018
    ISBN9781550963700
    The Death of Marlon Brando: A Novel

    Related to The Death of Marlon Brando

    Related ebooks

    Coming of Age Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Pallbearers Club

      Jun 15, 2022

      The Pallbearers Club
      1 min read

    • Article

      Honoring the Seams: The Memoir-in-Pieces

      Sep 1, 2020

      THE PAST IS present, and the present isn’t yet. We are what we remember plus the current circumstance. Time hurtles forward, but look at us contradicting ourselves as we zig and we zag all over the place. Those of us who wish to write memoir—to engag

      10 min read

    • Article

      Becoming George

      Mar 8, 2024

      George Orwell’s years as a colonial policeman in Burma in the 1920s preoccupied him for the rest of his life. Straight out of Eton, he was thrown into a world that mirrored the public school with its rivalries and floggings; except that now it was th

      3 min read

    • Article

      The William Trevor Reader: “A School Story”

      Nov 2, 2021

      This story is like watching a professional athlete competing for charity in a different sport—yes, Steph Curry is a very good golfer, but you’d still rather watch him shoot threes than hit chip shots from the rough. The post The William Trevor Reader

      3 min read

    • Article

      Returning to Walden

      Jul 17, 2017

      The novel achieves the alchemy of good fiction through which philosophy takes on all the flaws and ennoblements of real, embodied life. The post Returning to Walden appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      What’s THE point?

      May 4, 2023

      What’s THE point?
      6 min read

    • Article

      Chronicling Life’s White Machine

      Jul 31, 2017

      It is not hard to mentally recast writers as social media types: Knausgaard, the maximalist oversharer; Lerner, the pomo ironic; Cusk, the reticent philosopher; Heti, the more traditional diarist.   The post Chronicling Life’s White Machine appeared

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Sentimental Sadist

      Feb 7, 2017

      The Sentimental Sadist
      8 min read

    • Article

      We Are All Detectives Now: When Literary Plots Get Mysterious

      Mar 30, 2017

      There’s something reassuring about reading a story in which a heroic detective saves the day. Maybe it’s through tracking down a killer; maybe it’s finding a missing person. There’s that sense of closure, that sense that the protagonist has done the

      7 min read

    • Article

      Terrify Yourself with These Ten Horror Novels

      Jun 19, 2019

      A list of books so scary you definitely won't keep them on your nightstand. The post Terrify Yourself with These Ten Horror Novels appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Building The Bildungsroman

      Nov 4, 2021

      Building The Bildungsroman
      5 min read

    • Article

      After Trevor

      Jun 1, 2018

      After Trevor
      7 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Eugene Lim

      Dec 1, 2017

      1. Our current condition of ambient despair gets an excellent portraiture in Evelyn Hampton’s The Aleatory Abyss. It’s an obscure book about being obscure—or at least it is a book about occupying forgotten interstitial spaces and about being of and a

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Death of Marlon Brando

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Death of Marlon Brando - Pierre Gobeil

      Formatting note:
      In the electronic versions of this book
      blank pages that appear in the paperback
      have been removed.

      The Death of Marlon Brando

      PIERRE GOBEIL

      Translated and with a Foreword by

      Steven Urquhart

      Publishers of Fiction, Poetry, Non-fiction, Drama, Translations and Graphic Books

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Gobeil, Pierre

      [Mort de Marlon Brando. English]

      The death of Marlon Brando : a novel / Pierre Gobeil ; Steven Urquhart.

      Translation of: La mort de Marlon Brando.

      ISBN 978-1-55096-313-7

      I. Urquhart, Steven, 1974- II. Title. III Title: Mort de Marlon Brando.

      English.

      PS8563.O24M6713 2013 C843'.6 C2013-900140-9

      eBooks

      978-1-55096-370-0 (epub)

      978-1-55096-371-7 (mobi)

      978-1-55096-369-4 (PDF)

      Translation Copyright © Exile Editions and Steven Urquhart, 2013

      Foreword © Copyright Steven Urquhart, 2013

      Permission to translate La mort de Marlon Brando has been granted by Les Éditions Triptyque, which holds the French text copyright © 1989.

      Published by Exile Editions Ltd ~ www.ExileEditions.com

      144483 Southgate Road 14 – GD, Holstein, Ontario, N0G 2A0

      PDF, ePUB and MOBI versions by Melissa Campos Mendivil

      Publication Copyright © Exile Editions, 2013. All rights reserved

      We gratefully acknowledge, for their support toward our publishing activities, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

      Exile Editions eBooks are for personal use of the original buyer only. You may not modify, transmit, publish, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the content of this eBook, in whole or in part, without the expressed written consent of the publisher; to do so is an infringement of the copyright and other intellectual property laws. Any inquiries regarding publication rights, translation rights, or film rights – or if you consider this version to be a pirated copy – please contact us via e-mail at: info@exileeditions.com

      CONTENTS

      Foreword

      The Death of Marlon Brando

      Endnotes

      FOREWORD

      by Steven Urquhart

      Originally published in French in 1989, La mort de Marlon Brando has received relatively little critical attention despite being listed as one of a hundred must-read Quebecois novels by Nota bene Editions. Whether it be the novel’s troubling content or its enigmatic title, the reasons for this lack of attention are unclear and simply regrettable. Indeed, one cannot help but see the injustice of this situation when, according to well-known Quebecois journalist and literary critic Gilles Marcotte, the story has no weaknesses and doesn’t back down before the unfolding drama of an abandoned child. It reminds you of Steinbeck, Yves Thériault.

      Such praise demonstrates the merits of Pierre Gobeil’s novel, in which a young narrator called Charles relives the events leading up to his assault by a mentally handicapped farmhand, named Him. The Death of Marlon Brando deals tactfully with this delicate topic by focusing on the difficulty of expressing the unspeakable and insisting on the power of suggestion. As such, the question of translation in the sense of interpretation is at the centre of the novel, in which Charles struggles to communicate his angst and inner turmoil in relation to the farmhand as they coexist and carry out their respective duties on his parents’ land. Unable to speak to his parents, who ignore him and who trust their employee, Charles is disempowered and thus remains silent for the most part in the story. As the narrator of the novel, however, he does seem to find a voice which he uses to finally understand and explain what happened to him overt he course of a summer. Although this may not be clear at the beginning of the work, the attentive reader realizes little by little that Charles is not simply describing his traumatice xperience, but that he is also reliving it. We see this when he combines his thoughts at the time of the actual events with retrospective considerations dealing with what he did not say, or write in a school composition assigned for the summer break. In this way, the novel speaks more by what is not said than by what actually is.

      A composite work, Charles’ summer homework assignment acts like a cinema voice-off in the novel. Structured like Francis Ford Coppola’s celebrated film, Apocalypse Now, based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, the composition not only explains the title of Gobeil’s book, but conveys the sinister nature of events in the novel. In otherwords, the film, in which Marlon Brando’s character Colonel Kurtz is assassinated by a U.S. sergeant in the closing scene, reflects the fact that Charles is being stalked by a maleficent worker. This situation, which is misunderstood by his teachers who fail to recognize the film’s metaphoric quality within the text, invites readers to infer meaning in the text and pay attention to the nature of any given utterance or lack thereof. While serving as a guide to the reader who must contend with the novel’s disjointed sequence of events, the film and thus the composition also highlight Charles’ feelings of abandonment, betrayal and helplessness.

      Indeed, despite being more oblique than the narrative discourse, the vacation assignment allows Charles to name names, so to speak, and explain that which he cannot or does not want to admit, such as the farmhand’s monstrous character. Calling him an ornithorynchus, Latin for platypus, in the composition, Charles’ indirectly describes the anonymous French-Canadian antagonist’s strange behaviour and speech mannerisms. Unnameable in ways, Him effectively embodies this unusual and hybrid beast. Acting at once like an animal and then a child, despite being an adult, he also speaks in a roundabout fashion, using incorrect, foreign or invented words, which trouble the narrator. Disconcerted by Him’s language, which he understands in spite of its grammar mistakes and lexical peculiarities, Charles discovers that his illustrated dictionary is of no use to him when attempting to explain the nature of his disquieting situation and the inconspicuous threat that his parents’ employee represents. This situation effectively illustrates the need to read between the lines in the novel where the performative quality of words does not necessarily mean that silence is the equivalent to inaction.

      We also see this when he asks on three different occasions over the course of the novel: How can you know or tell? While soliciting the reader’s help here, this question betrays Charles’ feelings of bewilderment with respect to his pursuer’s behaviour and shows that he is simply stuck, that is to say, caught between the end of childhood and the beginning of adolescence. Although he understands the sinister nature of the farmhand’s innuendos and the inappropriateness of his behaviour toward him, Charles seems to overlook the fact that there is a physical difference between him and Him. During the confrontation in the barn where the boy fails to fully heed Him’s advice to watch his back, he realizes too late that, no matter which way he turns, he is alone and vulnerable, just like the bay mare.

      In the novel, the repeated mention of summer and the changing of the seasons foreshadows the arrival of the Fall or Charles’ loss of innocence. Associated with school vacations, this time of the year alludes to the boy’s forlorn feelings as he is stalked and then finally attacked. Abandoned by his family and the teachers, Charles lacks the know-how to deal with the antagonist who inundates him with words and a logic that he cannot quite grasp. Like the U.S. sergeant moving up the river, the farmhand progressively inhabits Charles to the point where he literally embodies him. Ironically, Charles describes this experience in terms of a void and someone having searched within his body. Robbed of his innocence, he is tormented by the lack of proof on his body, which bears no visible trace of the attack, and then, the change in his voice, which now resembles that of an adolescent. Brutally and prematurely initiated into this awkward time of life, Charles is disturbed by this unforeseen change which, despite its fatal character,

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1