Next Episode

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HUBERT AQUIN was born in Montreal, Quebec, in 1929. After receiving his licentiate in philosophy from the University of Montreal, he spent three years at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, then returned to the University of Montreal, where he studied for one year at the Institute of History.

Aquin worked as a radio and television producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Public Affairs division in Montreal and won many awards for his work as a director with the National Film Board.

One of Quebec’s prominent essayists, he turned to fiction in the 1960s. Next Episode (1965), Aquin’s first novel, is the searing first-person account of terrorism about to be perpetrated by the novel’s young narrator.

Hubert Aquin died in Montreal, Quebec, in 1977.

CUBA IS SINKING in flames in the middle of Lac Léman while I descend to the bottom of things. Packed inside my sentences, I glide, a ghost, into the river’s neurotic waters, discovering as I drift the underside of surfaces and the inverted image of the Alps. Between the anniversary of the Cuban revolution and the date of my trial, I have time enough to ramble on in peace, to open my unpublished book with great care, and to cover this paper with the key-words that won’t set me free. I’m writing on a card table next to a window looking out on grounds enclosed by a sharp iron fence that marks the boundary between what’s unpredictable and what is locked up. I won’t get out before the day of reckoning. That’s written in several carbon copies as decreed, following valid laws and an unassailable royal judge. There are no distractions then, nothing to replace the clockwork of my obsession or make me deviate from the written record of my journey.

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