The word taboo came to English from the islands of the Pacific, brought back by Captain Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer. It names something at once forbidden and sacred. In The Ogre of Grand Remous, the Quebec writer Robert Lalonde tells a story of such a social prohibition in a form that shifts between fairy tale and inquiry. At its center is one of the most unsettling transgressions imaginable: parents abandoning their children. It happens in life, too, though rarely is it spoken of with the candor Robert Lalonde brings to his 1992 novel (translated in english in 1995 by Leonard W. Sugden).

"What in the world was so beautiful—more beautiful than the four of us, their children?"

Charles, the eldest of the abandoned children, grows up to become a filmmaker. He stages the night of the dam, hiring actors to reenact the scene in which his parents left him and his brothers and sister behind. Their mother is feverish, ready to do anything to escape the obligations of parenthood. Their father is the more reasonable of the two, yet gives in to his wife's blackmail: she is a young student who has managed to seduce her older professor. Until the book's final pages, the reader takes this account on faith. So, for that matter, have Charles and his siblings.

Much of the story's magic lies in how little the truth seems to matter. The children avoid, with remarkable care, finding out what really happened—or even sharing the full extent of their ordeal with their community. They do so as children, and continue to do so as adults.

Lalonde divides the book into four chapters, one for each child: Charles, Aline, Serge, and Julien. Each is free to tell the story as he or she knows it, through childhood anecdotes and indelible moments in the isolated house in the woods where they lived without an adult, or through exchanges of letters. In neither case do they think of themselves as victims of a broken family compact. Their circumstances are simply what they are. Condemned to be free, they make do.

"Julien may be the most normal of us all. He's the one who suffers in plain sight."

—Serge

Charles was sixteen on the night of the dam. He took on the role of patriarch and developed a symbiotic relationship with his sister Aline. The only girl, she was fifteen; as an adult, she took to a nomadic life. Serge, fourteen, chose a life of art and insouciance on the American East Coast. Julien, the youngest, was nine. He stayed in Grand Remous for the rest of his life.

Like any good work of art, Lalonde's book unsettles its reader. We question the children's conclusion. Did their parents really abandon them? If so, why didn't the authorities intervene? Then we wonder whether parents can abandon their children at all. And we grow frustrated with a story that makes no effort to answer our questions.

What Lalonde does instead is leave the children with their own truth—their subjective experience of events over which they had no control. In the end, the truth is what they believe. They have survived a traumatic ordeal, and by the time we reach the end of the book, we begin to understand that the first thing to do in the face of human suffering is to let it speak, without judgment.

"The world's words are always tangled, and we'd rather trust our own eyes than try to decipher things."

Julien holds the key to the story. He is presented as a figure poised somewhere between psychosis and mystical ecstasy. His thinking has something of the primitive about it: he lives in an eternal present and behaves as though he belonged to the natural world.

"Julien is neither educated nor enlisted in religion. He lives in the present, in a certain kind of natural freedom."

Like the stream of consciousness familiar from James Joyce and William Faulkner, Julien's chapter is absorbing. It is delirium, but something in it reaches us: colors, emotions, intuitions. We understand more or less what is happening. That is enough.

"There have to be people like me."

—Julien

I first thought to explore Robert Lalonde's work after seeing him play Jack Kerouac in the play Cosse-tu penses mon p’tit bonhomme ? — Jack Kerouac. I devoured The Ogre of Grand Remous in two days. It is an unlikely story, though one that arrives, by the book's end, at a kind of conclusion.

It is also a difficult read, because it asks us to confront human suffering. When I say victims should be allowed to speak without judgment, I am not repeating advice from therapy professionals. I mean something more elemental, and more sincere. Faced with another person's suffering, visible or hidden, silence is often the best response. Let the other person speak; accept, on our part, that we may not understand everything—or understand it very well.

translated from french by an AI. Quotations have also been translated from french by the very same AI.