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Poussière sur la ville

Poussière sur la ville (1953), a novel by André Langevin, dramatizes, with the simple structural elegance of Greek tragedy and the complex tone and perspective of modern existentialist literature, the failure of a marriage.

Poussière sur la ville (1953), a novel by André Langevin, dramatizes, with the simple structural elegance of Greek tragedy and the complex tone and perspective of modern existentialist literature, the failure of a marriage. The setting of Macklin, an industrial town modelled after Thetford Mines, Québec, and dominated by dreary winter weather, grey asbestos dust and garish neon lights, encloses the narrator's despair and inability to communicate, pitted as he is against repressive community standards. A city boy, Dr Alain Dubois recalls his unlikely marriage to the passionate Madeleine; his ambivalence about her affair with Richard Hétu, broken up by the parish priests; and finally her suicide, reinforcing his decision to remain in Macklin to practise medicine - an act of compassion and revenge. Awarded the Prix du Cercle du livre de France, the novel was translated by John Latrobe and Robert Gottlieb as Dust over the City (1955).

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Poussière sur la ville