Querelle of Roberval

By Kevin Lambert and Donald Winkler

Shortlisted for the 2022 Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize • Winner of the 2023 ReLit Award for Fiction • Longlisted for the 2024 Dublin Literary Award

Homage to Jean Genet’s antihero and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of the Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.

As a millworkers’ strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval drags on, tensions start to escalate between the workers—but when a lockout renews their solidarity, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashing newcomer from Montreal. Strapping and unabashed, likeable but callow, by day he walks the picket lines and at night moves like a mythic Adonis through the ranks of young men who flock to his apartment for sex. As the dispute hardens and both sides refuse to yield, sand stalls the gears of the economic machine and the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent. Trenchant social drama, a tribute to Jean Genet’s antihero, and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biblioasis
• Release date: Aug 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781771963558

Kevin Lambert

Born in 1992, Kevin Lambert grew up in Chicoutimi, Quebec. May Our Joy Endure won the Prix Médicis, Prix Décembre, and Prix Ringuet, and was a finalist for the Prix Goncourt. His second novel, Querelle de Roberval, was acclaimed in Quebec, where it was nominated for four literary prizes; in France, where it was a finalist for the Prix Médicis and Prix Le Monde and won the Prix Sade; and Canada, where it was shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. His first novel, You Will Love What You Have Killed, also widely acclaimed, won a prize for the best novel from the Saguenay region and was a finalist for Quebec’s Booksellers’ Prize. Lambert lives in Montreal.

Book preview

Biblioasis International Translation Series

General Editor: Stephen Henighan

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1   

I Wrote Stone: The Selected Poetry of Ryszard Kapuściński (Poland)

Translated by Diana Kuprel and Marek Kusiba

2   

Good Morning Comrades by Ondjaki (Angola)

Translated by Stephen Henighan

3   

Kahn & Engelmann by Hans Eichner (Austria-Canada)

Translated by Jean M. Snook

4   

Dance with Snakes by Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador)

Translated by Lee Paula Springer

5   

Black Alley by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

Translated by Dawn M. Cornelio

6   

The Accident by Mihail Sebastian (Romania)

Translated by Stephen Henighan

7    Love Poems by Jaime Sabines (Mexico)

Translated by Colin Carberry

8   

The End of the Story by Liliana Heker (Argentina)

Translated by Andrea G. Labinger

9   

The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

Translated by David Brookshaw

10 

For as Far as the Eye Can See by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

Translated by Judith Cowan

11 

Eucalyptus by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

Translated by Donald Winkler

12  

Granma Nineteen and the Soviet’s Secret by Ondjaki (Angola)

Translated by Stephen Henighan

13  

Montreal Before Spring by Robert Melançon (Quebec)

Translated by Donald McGrath

14 

Pensativities: Essays and Provocations by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

Translated by David Brookshaw

15  

Arvida by Samuel Archibald (Quebec)

Translated by Donald Winkler

16  

The Orange Grove by Larry Tremblay (Quebec)

Translated by Sheila Fischman

17  

The Party Wall by Catherine Leroux (Quebec)

Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

18 

Black Bread by Emili Teixidor (Catalonia)

Translated by Peter Bush

19  

Boundary by Andrée A. Michaud (Quebec)

Translated by Donald Winkler

20  

Red, Yellow, Green by Alejandro Saravia (Bolivia-Canada)

Translated by María José Giménez

21 

Bookshops: A Reader’s History by Jorge Carrión (Spain)

Translated by Peter Bush

22  

Transparent City by Ondjaki (Angola)

Translated by Stephen Henighan

23  

Oscar by Mauricio Segura (Quebec)

Translated by Donald Winkler

24  

Madame Victoria by Catherine Leroux (Quebec)

Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

25  

Rain and Other Stories by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

Translated by Eric M. B. Becker

26  

The Dishwasher by Stéphane Larue (Quebec)

Translated by Pablo Strauss

27  

Mostarghia by Maya Ombasic (Quebec)

Translated by Donald Winkler

28  

Dead Heat by Benedek Totth (Hungary)

Translated by Ildikó Noémi Nagy

29  

If You Hear Me by Pascale Quiviger (Quebec)

Translated by Lazer Lederhendler

30  

The Unseen by Roy Jacobsen (Norway)

Translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

31  

You Will Love What You Have Killed by Kevin Lambert (Quebec)

Translated by Donald Winkler

32  

Against Amazon and Other Essays by Jorge Carrión (Spain)

Translated by Peter Bush

33  

Sea Loves Me: Selected Stories by Mia Couto (Mozambique)

Translated by David Brookshaw with Eric M. B. Becker

34  

On Time and Water by Andri Snaer Magnason (Iceland)

Translated by Lytton Smith

35  

White Shadow by Roy Jacobsen (Norway)

Translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

36  

The Music Game by Stéfanie Clermont (Ontario)

Translated by JC Sutcliffe

37  

Eyes of the Rigel by Roy Jacobsen (Norway)

Translated by Don Bartlett and Don Shaw

38  

Querelle of Roberval by Kevin Lambert (Quebec)

Translated by Donald Winkler

Contents

PROLOGUE

Night Shift

General Assembly

Pressure Tactics

Continuation

Merchandise

Picket Line

Sedition

Workforce

Comrades

Solidarity

Demands

Assurances

Good Old Days

Holidays

PARODOS

Lumpenproletariat

Division of Labour

Grievances

The Local Economy

Antisyndicalism

Natural Resources

Free Trade

Press Release

Optimization of the Installations

STASIMON

Sick Leave

Lockout

Open Letter

Investment

Combat Unionism

Scab

Vox Populi

KOMMOS

First Aid

Economic Disturbances

Collective Agreement

EXODOS

Layoff

EPILOGUE

QUERELLE OF ROBERVAL

a syndical fiction

Kevin Lambert

translated from the french

by donald winkler

BIBLIOASIS

Windsor, Ontario

First published as Querelle de Roberval, © Héliotrope, 2018

Translation copyright © Donald Winkler, 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence visit

www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: Querelle of Roberval : a syndical fiction / Kevin Lambert ; translated from the French by Donald Winkler.

Other titles: Querelle de Roberval. English

Names: Lambert, Kevin, 1992- author. | Winkler, Donald, translator.

Series: Biblioasis international translation series ; 38.

Description: Series statement: Biblioasis international translation series ; 38

Translation of: Querelle de Roberval.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210370963 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210371005 ISBN 9781771963541 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771963558 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS8623.A48393 Q413 2022 | DDC C843/.6—dc23

Edited by Stephen Henighan

Copyedited by John Sweet

Cover designed by Zoe Norvell

Typeset by Vanessa Stauffer

Canada Council for the Arts Logo Government of Canada Logo

Ontario Creates LogoOntario Arts Council Logo

Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.

Genet’s sailors, however unreal they may have been, had not said their last word, and their literary sperm begot ghosts that left one house only to enter another, and to prolong, half in jest and half-seriously, their little game of shroud and chain.

jean basile

,

opus 666

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Don’t stop now, just be the champion

Work it hard, like it’s your profession

Watch out now, cause here it comes

Here comes the smasher, here comes the master

Here comes the big beat, big beat disaster

No time to quit now, just time to get it now

Pick up what I’m putting down

Pick up what I’m putting down

britney spears, work bitch

PROLOGUE

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Night Shift

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They’re beautiful, all the boys who come into Querelle’s room, who line up to be taken from behind, he strings them on a necklace, the beautiful young-boys necklace he wears around his neck as our priests do their rosaries and our boss ladies their pearls. Querelle loves the young boys, the serious boys from good families and the bad boys who hang out in front of the prison gates at night when they free for the weekend prisoners longing for smooth skin and round cheeks and the boys file past the fence to the cars in the parking lot that take them straight off to the first motel along the road. Querelle is at a loss for words to describe the fierce pleasure he feels in undressing them, the little slutboys of love, peeling each piece of clothing from their small bodies. They’re sometimes 16/17/19/21 years old, the young flesh is tender and the skin drawn taut at 25 years old and –, as is stipulated in his Grindr profile; he bites into it with his sharp teeth, his face between their thighs, eases them onto their bellies, holds them down gently as he passes his tongue over their openings, clenched and beseeching.

Querelle’s boys have fled their school desks when he fucks them in the morning before returning to the factory; they’re on their way back from parties with their friends and are not in bed yet late in the night, when he picks them up after his shift. And when he wakes at last before noon, Querelle impales them once again before restoring them to their tearful mothers. The boys love big cocks and the taste of Sour Puss, they adore being dominated by men who could be their fathers, they send out photos of themselves taken in their bedroom mirrors, their gaping buttocks begging Querelle to love them. They talk of him to their girlfriends but never to their parents, they send him thousands of messages on many sites, but he rarely responds. Querelle never picks out the boy he’ll be spending the night with; when he wants a home for his member, he gives his address to the first available candidate, and if by chance his lips have already had the privilege of sucking off the great Querelle, then the boy instantly falls in love. They all want it to be their body that will make him come, they can never get enough of him, a single penetration doesn’t answer to their needs, but in satiating Querelle’s wild desires, in being eternally there, in his bed, within reach of his glans, awaiting the moment when he’ll at once get hard and have to start in, then in becoming his whore, his bitch, his very own slut—that’s what, roused, he calls them—perhaps they’ll feel more worthy. Querelle’s boys seek in the hot spunk running down their thighs confirmation of each emission’s inner life. In time they’d like to supplant the phone he picks up to check all the other profiles online. Querelle’s boys don’t want him fucking their brothers and sisters. They want to feel as unique to him as he is to them—you never get ravished like that twice in your life, they all tell themselves, they’re young but they have one sure thing to hang on to, all those boys on bikes speeding through the night, patterned boxers under their shorts, too short, who never wear helmets on the way to being defiled in their divine lover’s bed, the bed of their imagined assassin, their glorious executioner—said to be responsible for a missing adolescent’s death. True or false, they believe the story, because we know well, feeling his forearm choke off our air, that one day he will strangle one of us, and slash his throat with a serrated blade, raining down seed on his viscera.

Querelle is not known for his brilliance, but in the blows from his pelvis there flickers a different kind of genius. Without fail, his hands that hold them motionless in his bed, the long, hard shaft sunk in up to his balls, make the soiled boys come, the scandalous spread-eagled boys, swallowers of his honeyed jism. On the heights of Roberval there is a room, a third floor bright and warm, not spacious, just a one-bedroom, something of a bargain given its view of the lake. It is there, each night, that the boys flock in pursuit of their orgasms.

General Assembly

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The ice hangs tough on Lac Saint-Jean, the cars pass fast on the 169, the December wind’s no treat, it’s heartless, you wouldn’t put a dog outside. But they’re there, the stray dogs that, trolling the roadsides, frenzied, have snapped their chains, fled distant farms: they bolt through the fields this way and that, prey to madness. And at seven thirty in the morning, with the sun up but just barely, chipping away at winter’s grey chill, the strikers are caught between the local road and the entrance gate, they have a view of the lake, a timid fire burning in an old dryer tub, and not much else. The fire crackles and squirms a little, it does what it can to warm the world. Hot it ain’t, says Judith, arriving with her tray of Tim Hortons coffees, she’s stopped off at Roberval. One milk and one sugar each, it’s too cold to fuss over little cups or paper packets: at thirty-two below outside—with the wind—you don’t take off your mitts, and if they have holes in them, you damn well know it.

Six coffees for twelve. She didn’t have enough hands, she’ll go back later. She’ll get one black for Bernard, he likes his black. Bernard is dreaming of the drink warm in his hand. The morning gets to you after a while, every little puff into the hollow of your fist tries to ward it off, but the cold is back before you can even take another breath. Bernard’s hand is trembling, it can barely grip the pole with, at its tip, the white sign twisting in every gust of wind, concealing, then revealing: long live the mill! His fingers are red, almost white, his joints are chapped, all of them ready to crack open, his blood is sluggish thanks to the cold. He’s left his mitts on the hall table at home. When he can’t bear it anymore, Bernard switches hands, puts the cold one into the deep, barely insulated pocket of his Ski-Doo suit, and the other one takes over. It touches the wood, almost sticks there the handle’s so icy, like on the lamp pole where you planted your tongue when you were a kid, despite all the warnings. The others’ tongues are quietly lapping the watch it, hot! coffee, scalding beyond belief, burning like the air bites when you hold your face to the wind.

You see them from your car along the local road. All the human resources lined up on the same side of the fire or turning their backs to it so as not to have the wind in their faces, their heads hunched under their hoods, their pride tenuously held in place. Sometimes there’s a little blast from a horn to encourage them; then the union’s flag, the Dollarama placards, are waved in the air. Just back a bit, a few metres from the fire, there’s always a car with its motor running. Two guys lean against it, smoking, another is inside. When it’s your turn, you can go and sit there for fifteen minutes, the heat turned up high, you have to guard against frostbite like the union lady said. They’re the ones who wanted it, who wanted to be there, no one forced them out, the factory is open and nice and warm, that’s what the boss says to himself when he passes the picket line in his brand new pickup with its heated seats, its hi-fi just like in his office, in his house, in his other car, the truck pulls up to 31,200 pounds—he’d helped a guy, once, haul his boat out of the lake—he could have had it financed, but he’d paid cash. He stops right beside the Civic. He opens the door, his Coldplay drowns out the trucks on the local road, his woman is with him, Anne-France, she’s a former employee who’s now vice-president of the company, a climber who always wanted to get ahead and treat herself to designer clothes, her family on the Martel side owns the Dolbeau-Mistassini funeral parlour, she grew up with a silver spoon in her mouth, everyone knows she married the boss just to get leverage over the factory, to be better than others, and to flounce around all week long in the offices and on weekends in their opulent house by the lake. She’s carrying a tray of Tim Hortons coffees and wearing a sable fur headband that matches her mitts. Six extra-large coffees for the dozen picketers, a little paper bag with milk and sugar, saying have a nice day, it’s cold out here.

They pass around the coffees to those who haven’t had any. Bernard takes a large, steaming cup of dark brew that warms his hands, dips in his lips, it’s boiling hot. He hears someone cough, then cough harder. It’s Querelle raking his throat, he drops his coffee, leans over, and spews some thick, brownish slime that makes a hole in the snow. Then it’s Charlish bending down and bleating, his mitts to his neck, and soon all who have tasted the boss’s coffee are hunched over and belching out everything in their stomachs. Bernard has not even had time to swallow his first mouthful when he feels it rising and he vomits. Jézabel’s whole breakfast pours out, the two slices of toast, the eggs that ooze through her nose, that’s not good, everything’s in a fog from the tears crystallizing at the corners of her eyes, her esophagus contracts violently to expel the very last drop of that drink she downed too quickly. All six of the guys who drank from a big red cup have their stomachs in a knot. That was it, that little taste, the faint smell that your nose, frozen stiff, couldn’t sense, and that burned your throat as it went down. A little shot of bleach to start the day, well mixed into the strong coffee.

If he had known it would work out so well, he would have brought more, thinks the boss, savouring his own coffee in the warmth of his office, in front of the window looking out on the deserted machinery. It’s been silent since September. But the emails are still coming in, they have enough work to fill the day. Down the hill leading to the sawmill there are six picketers remaining, while the others have gone to have their stomachs pumped at the Roberval hospital.

Pressure Tactics

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A little over twenty specialized workers are on