Quebecker Jacques Godbout's 1967 novel Salut Galarneau! is semi-autobiographical, produced as the diary of François Galarneau, a young Quebecker man who owns a hot dog stand but is striving to become a writer. Unfortunately, his father dies and his mother leaves for America, leaving him without any parental guidance, and his love life is a series of seemingly promisingly relationships that end badly. What follows is something of an existential crisis for François as he literally builds a wall around himself, debating the seeming incompatibility of living and writing. His solution is 'vécrire', a made-up verb which is a mix of the French verbs for to write (écrire) and to live (vivre), suggesting a hopeful and more positive future for François.
The structure of the novel itself is rather bizarre, with no particular sense of chronology, as François recounts events from various points in his life in a sporadic manner, seemingly as they occur to him. Therefore, the novel retains strong elements of realism and is very believable as a diary, but since François was supposedly writing it in the hope of it being published, this is a slightly unusual structure that could be seen to reflect the manner in which writing is taking over François's life, leaving him with very little control over the content he produces. Analysis aside, this feature makes the novel quite difficult to follow at times, and requires a certain effort on the part of the reader to formulate the continuity of the plot.
Conceptually, Godbout addresses a wide variety of topical issues in Quebec: that of the ever-looming anglo-american presence which threatens the francophone Quebeckers' existence daily. Despite berating the use of anglicisms profoundly, François still uses 'hot dog' rather than 'chien chaud' in the name of his hot dog stand, and frequently uses anglicisims in his conversation and writing, illustrating how integral they have become to French Canadian identity, simultaneously setting them apart from French speakers of France and other anglophone Canadians. Additionally, Godbout uses François to question the importance of formal education as against the education you receive simply through experiencing new things and challenges in life. François describes himself as a victim of compulsory education and talks about the suffering of the educated - if you are ignorant, you cannot question things, and are perfectly happy in your existence, whereas educated people are more likely to be unhappy due to their awareness of and questioning of other things, echoing Ernest Hemingway's famous quotation: "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know."
Despite the inclusion of these undoubtedly interesting topics, Salut Galarneau! remains a fairly jarring read with its lack of continuity being its greatest weakness. I daresay that if it was structured slightly differently, I would have very little to criticise, as the content itself is interesting, just too disjointed to create a properly cohesive novel. Unfortunately, following on from The Alchemist last week, anything else was likely to pale in comparison, and Salut Galarneau! certainly did.
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