Synapses
Formally inventive, Simon Brousseau's Synapses orchestrates a series of beautifully crafted literary snapshots, each involving a different character, eloquently presented using a sole, twisting and turning, stylistically accomplished sentence written in the second-person singular. Brousseau depicts a vast society of differing psyches and souls, all unique and idiosyncratic, yet interconnected, quasi neurologically, in a dialogic network of humanity. With Synapses, his first novel, Brousseau realizes the surprising feat of a pointillist literary masterpiece.
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Become an affiliateSimon Brousseau was born in Quebec City in 1985. He lives in Montreal and teaches literature at Jean-de-Brébeuf College. In 2014 at Université du Québec à Montréal he defended his dissertation on the work of David Foster Wallace and the question of literary influence (to be published as an essay by Éditions Nota Bene in 2019) . Synapses, his first novel (Cheval d'août, 2016) was a finalist in the 2017 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, and will be published in English with Talonbooks in 2019, translated by Pablo Strauss. Les fins heureuses (Cheval d'août, 2018) is a collection of short stories.
"By situating the reader in a multitude of perspectives, [Brousseau] pushes the limits of human empathy in ways that a traditional novel cannot"
--Montréal Review of Books
"The mind searches for and finds pleasing dialogic connections between the snapshots."
--Ian MacLean, The Malahat Review