The Cycle

We don’t know what the dead man is thinking, but we eavesdrop on his family, at the funeral parlor and elsewhere, from grandson Jacky through wife, sons and daughters — seven streams of semi-consciousness.

These voices (alternately bitter, tender, lewd, sanctimonious, frightened but always egotistical) add up to a portrait not only of a family but a society. It is a tour de force with all the wit and irony we expect from Gérard Bessette, one of Quebec literature’s greatest stylist.

Le Cycle won the Governor General’s Award in 1972.