8 March 2014

On the Road

Anakana Schofield

One Saturday afternoon last summer, the forecast for rain, I set out on a dérive. Or not quite a dérive, because I knew where I was going, or aiming to go: to the dump, more than 70 blocks away across Vancouver, while reading Michèle Bernstein's The Night in Clodagh Kinsella’s new translation. Bernstein’s intention fifty years ago was to create a ‘fake popular novel’ that would both form a ‘critique of the novel itself’ and alleviate her and Guy Debord’s financial woes. The narrator of La Nuit, Geneviève, is in a ménage-à-trois with Gilles and Carole. The novel describes a walk through Paris over the course of a night.