Next in the line for the enlightening effect of being spotlit here is a brief history in the form of a novel.
Written by Quebecois writer and intellectual Claude Jasmin, the story is about a relationship between lovers, a couple who are at the center of a Quebec separatist bombing.
The background for the book is a historical event: the 1963 bombing of a Canadian military recruitment center in Montreal, killing one Wilfred O'Neil, an overnight guard. The killing was a surprising accident, as the Quebecois nationalists and separatists had been known to bomb symbols of the established relationship between the English and French segments of Canadian society, but they'd do it, like Basque separatists, late at night when the places are usually empty.
The French-Canadian intellectuals and writers, the young folks, were almost all sympathetic to the separatist terrorists, that is, right up until the death of Wilfred O'Neil, a French-speaking gent of Irish descent. This event caused them to look inwards.
For one person, Claude Jasmin, the result was this quick novel. Ethel and her lover, the narrator, start out on the run right after the bomb goes off, and they head to New York as the everything unfolds.
The book was originally published in French in 1964, a year after the bombing, and was translated into English by David S. Walker in 1965. The copy here is one of those first English printings from 1965.
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