Incubation

It is ten years after the Second World War. Lagare, the narrator, and his friend Gordon wander from bar to bar in Montreal. With brilliant mastery of the stream-of-consciousness technique, Bessette moves back and forth in dream-like and hallucinatory sequences to explore love, the loneliness of man, guilt, and language. This novel is a “quest for an unbearable, unsayable, and deferred truth.”

Incubation is a classic of our literature. In its French edition, this novel won first prize in the Concours Littéraire de la Province de Québec, 1965, and the Governor General’s Award, 1966.