Gaetan Soucy

I'm reading Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches one incident at a time, one day at a time, because I am BLOWN OVER by the novelist's voice. 

His name is Gaeton Soucy.  Personally, I'd never give that name to a character; too florid.  This Quebecer's writing is equally florid, maybe even gothic, and fershur outre whether in his native French or in translation, but I'm not sure it's too-too. 

Why? you ask. 

Because, I respond, his theme is insanity, his characters are crazy, and the narrator is an authentic Wild Child who doesn't know she's a nubile girl, or a millionaire's daughter, or is pregnant by her brother.  And the reader gets to figure this all out through the labyrinth of her first-person language. Yesterday I read the part where she encounters her first attractive man; it was, er, tittilating, funny, apalling, and it briskly carried the story right along.  Now she has to go home without the coffin for her daddy.  See what I mean, outre?

Reviews of Soucy's novels (there are three others) compare his work to Samuel Beckett's, which is so simplistic and far off the mark it is to laugh.  The critics are correct that it's brilliant, inventive, unique, and a passel of other usually hyberbolic terms. 

I would urge everyone to rush out and get a copy of anything he's written, but...  This writer is not for the squeamish or the easily offended.  Besides, I still don't know whether I like The Little Girl Who Was Too Fond of Matches.

Oh, by the way: the jacket blurb says Gaetan Soucy is a brain who teaches philosophy in Montreal and has studied Japanese.   I think his grin looks phony. 

Here's the next chapter of Dead on Dutcher's Mountain.


Eight

Gunderson’s call to McCoy that afternoon ultimately received the sheriff’s undivided attention, but first it had to penetrate the layers of his official working mode and worm its way to the man himself.

“An old corpse?”  Humming a little, McCoy selected from a stack of pink telephone messages.  He cast a perfunctory eye upon a list of e-mail topics pulsing on his computer screen.  “During a picnic for the visitors?  What’s an old corpse, some geezer up there die on you?  Or you talking skeleton?  Whooee this is a bunch of e-mail!  Those bosses of yours like to communicate!  Oh?  Not quite a skeleton?  Ugly!  Female?  Caught in a bear trap?”  McCoy set down the pink slips and pivoted to face his desk, thinking of Gail Webster and frowning.  He fingered the volume switch on his radio.  “Mrs. Bailey found it?...yeah, they generally smell pretty bad even in the open.  Mrs. Bailey all right?  Excuse me; back in a flash.”  He put Gunderson on hold.

“Deputy Linda!”

“Got it!” his secretary called back.  “Hal’s gone for the van!”

“Loveya!  Put in my camera strobes, will you?”

He punched up Gunderson’s line.  “Sorry; you still there?  So this former body was ‘way up the hill?  Oh; yes, I remember that cave.  Who all saw it?  She didn’t?  Good; good...yeah, she’s only seven...Jones?  He did?  Good man.  Listen.  It’ll take a while to get up there, so...okay, what?”  McCoy listened.  He doodled stars on his blotter-sized calendar.  He shifted his position, gauging time from the slant of the sunlight on the hall windows.

Then Gunderson caught McCoy’s attention again.  He stopped fiddling with his pen.  “Voerst?  You sure it was arousal?  He wasn’t just nauseated by the corpse?”  He forgot the slant of the sun; stood up, finally attentive, and studied the dark tiles between his feet.  His mouth pursed with distaste, but there was no expression in his yellowish eyes; they had become official, guarded; the focused eyes of a man capable of doing harm. 

More slowly he said, “That’s one sick puppy.  And he used a scalpel on your hand?  Sophisticated weapon; also indicates premeditation.  Now, obviously you know about the rules of evidence and hearsay; statute of limitations; things like that.”  He listened again.  He bent over his calendar and wrote, VenLoo, Robin.  “Okay, listen.  It looks like the guy is scarier than I thought.  As you say, there’s no proof and it’s an old offense.  But he’ll likely try something again along that line.  And in the other direction, the business direction, he’s doing something funny by playing Number Two up there at the mine.  Yes.  I’ll be up directly.  And Gunderson?  I appreciate knowing about VenLoo; I do.”