Novel
La Guerre, Yes Sir!
La Guerre, yes Sir !
Roch Carrier · 1968
Synopsis
A village in rural Quebec, one winter of the Second World War. Seven English soldiers bring back the coffin of Corriveau, the first child of the village taken by the war: six carry it, the seventh gives orders. Joseph has cut off his hand with an axe to escape conscription. Bérubé, a friend of the dead man, arrives with Molly, the young wife he has brought back from Newfoundland, and beats her. At the Corriveaus', the wake turns into a party: people pray, eat, drink cider, swear, and between the villagers and the soldiers language is a wall.
Context
The first novel by its author, published in Montreal by Éditions du Jour in 1968, in one hundred and twenty-six pages. It takes the conscription crisis as a figure for the relations between the country's two languages. Sheila Fischman, who translated it as early as 1970 in Toronto, needed the author's help with the swearwords and liturgical expressions. The company he served adapted it the same year, in a staging by Albert Millaire, and an English version was performed at Stratford in 1972. Two other novels followed, which form a trilogy with this one.
Who it is for
A very short book, in an oral, blasphemous language, to be read in one sitting. The violence is constant and the comedy does not soften it.
Prizes and reception
The first and best-known of its author's novels according to the Canadian Encyclopedia, reissued in English in a trilogy in 2013.
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