The Second Substance

(Paperback)

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Squatters at a rural gas station try to find freedom and build something new on the ashes of our petrocivilization in this sensual novel.

A community of outsiders takes over an abandoned gas station. They spend their days ripping up asphalt, drinking beer and eating hot dogs, and wandering through woods and towns in search of new ways of living. People come and go: a charismatic landscaper, Italian anarchists, a policewoman, travellers. A teenager drifts into homelessness. And The Girl With No Name keeps a journal of her attempts to meet new people and sleep with them, sex that is not a sideline but the motivating force in a story she is struggling to understand.

Neighbors grow hostile. An investigation threatens the community. Tension builds between the surface violence of normal life and the attempt of these outsiders to experience freedom and build something new on the ashes of our oil-addicted society.

With a character borrowed from Agns Vardas Vagabond and inspiration taken from Anne Boyers writings, Anne Lardeuxs highly original debut assembles elements of poetry, film, and visual arts into an exuberant choral novel, an ode to the daughters of fire and to the poetry of the body. Often funny, sometimes raunchy, consistently surprising, never flinching, The Second Substance heralds an important new voice in Quebec literature.

"A revolutionary diary that parses the lines of sex and power, in language that pushes itself around on the page like paint. With echoes of Emma Goldman's if I can't dance, Lardeux's revolution has fucking at its core. The Second SubstanceQueen Solomon

A nomadic miscellany of gruff scavengers and would-be pioneers has commandeered the derelict filling station at 69 Rue Principalean anonymous sensualist and moonlighting authoritarian among themall jockeying for position at the nexus of self-determination and fate. In Anne Lardeuxs enigmatic debut, presented here in a translation by Pablo Strauss, the constant friction between societal strictures and communal revision spark a series of disorderly experiments, abstract epiphanies blasting off in every direction.The Second SubstanceJustin Walls, Bookshop.org

Reviews

"Shelve Anne Lardeux with Qubcoise writers like Mikella Nicol and Christiane Vadnais, and internationally with Yun Ko-eun, Vronique Tadjo, Jenny Hval, and Sandrine Colettewriters whose characters are terrorized and galvanized by narrative." Marcie McCauley,World Literature Today

"Much like the self-described mind of the book's primary narrator The Girl With No Name, Lardeux's writing is 'sharp as a blade but tender' and, with this assured first book, claims a unique corner of its own within the wide field of contemporary dystopian lit." Alexa W.,Powell's Books

"After reading [The Second Substance], you may forget how to read from left to right, or walk by putting one foot in front of the other A mix of black humour, the absurd, and little stories in a highly inventive style "Le Matricule des Anges(France)

"A strongly erotic first novel swept along by free, sensual writing, an ode to the daughters of fire and the poetry of the body."Les libraires(Quebec)

"Walk in the woods, hunt, chop wood, fuck, sleep and the cycle repeats a return to animal instincts and the senses [] A compelling first novel with a surprising mastery of language and style." Bruno Cloutier (Quebec)

"An archipelago,The Second Substances islands comprise diary entries, film script, fantasy sequences, and authorial confessions." Jacob James Bews,Filling Station Magazine

Author Bio

Anne Lardeux was raised in France and lives and works in Montreal, where she painstakingly follows her ideas and convictions where they lead. Her multidisciplinary practice spans music, film, and writing, and is not easily separable from her social activism and caring work. Together they constitute an unsparingly honest but playful interrogation of how we live that turns up glimmers of hope in unlikely places.The Second Substance(Les mauvais plis) is her first novel.