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An astonishing novel, Vandal Love follows generations of a unique French-Canadian family across North America, and through the twentieth century, as they struggle to find their place in the world.
A family curse — a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship — causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book I of Vandal Love follows the giants' line, exploring Jude Hervé's career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man.
Book II traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. François searches for years for his missing father; his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into spiritual quests. But none of the Hervés can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like themselves.
In assured and almost mystically powerful prose, D.Y. Béchard tells a wide-ranging, spellbinding story of a family trying to create an identity in an unwelcoming North America. Political, poetic, and philosophically searching, and imbued throughout with a deep sensitivity to the physical world, Vandal Love is a breathtaking literary debut about the power of love to create and destroy — in our lives, and in our history. "Over a vast yet beautifully coherent canvas, Vandal Love follows the panic and privilege of human longing through an amazing coalition of loneliness and adaptation. These characters - injured but unbowed, broken but enduring - introduce a gifted new writer. Béchard's surety of voice and confident narrative span declare a first rate novel and an eloquent debut." - Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, jury comments
"Vandal Love is a generational novel with a difference. It has a magical touch... Complex, perplexing, but lyrical, this is a novel that will sweep you away with its scope, energy and ambition. Only time will tell if Vandal Love is remembered in a decade. My guess is yes." -The Sun Times (Owen Sound)
"Béchard is an ambitious and skillful storyteller. His specialty is finding words to describe longing... The cover blurb for Vandal Love says it is about the power of love, but I thought is was more about blood: what our veins inherit, and how it both holds and haunts us." -Georgia Straight
"Masterful storytelling and heartbreakingly beautiful writing-Vandal Love delivers this and more in an epic tale of love, family, and country. I could not put it down, and when the journey finally ended, I refused to lend my copy and instead bought extras to spread the joy." - Loung Ung, author of Lucky Child and First They Killed My Father.
"The word 'masterpiece' is not to be used lightly, but one is tempted in the case of Vandal Love, for the scope of its ambition, its originality, and its muscular use of language conjure a young Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, or Steinbeck." - Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World
"Although Vandal Love is a first novel, it reads as smoothly as if [Béchard] had a library to his name — mature, lyrical, tactile and at times simple, cruel and sweet... No doubt, the giant steps this young writer has taken will set him far ahead on his literary path."
— Calgary Herald (Interview, 28 Jan 2006)
"D.Y. Béchard surpasses Kerouac in his consciousness of the French as part of a larger people, how their struggle is socially and politically situated rather than strictly personal ... Vandal Love seems like a trans-generational On the Road, which, also infused with a kind of inherited defeatism, was the perfect Americanized expression of an unexamined Existentialism, the ultimate Beat utterance."
-Michel Basilieres, The Globe and Mail
"Lyrical, compelling, moving (both figuratively and literally) the characters in Vandal Love
A family curse — a genetic trick resulting from centuries of hardship — causes the Hervé children to be born either giants or runts. Book I of Vandal Love follows the giants' line, exploring Jude Hervé's career as a boxer in Georgia and Louisiana in the 1960s, his escape from that brutal life alone with his baby daughter Isa, and her eventual decision to enter into a strange, chaste marriage with a much older man.
Book II traces a different kind of life entirely, as the runts of the family discover that their power lies in a kind of unifying love. François searches for years for his missing father; his own son, Harvey, flees from modern society into spiritual quests. But none of the Hervés can abandon their longing for a place where they might find others like themselves.
In assured and almost mystically powerful prose, D.Y. Béchard tells a wide-ranging, spellbinding story of a family trying to create an identity in an unwelcoming North America. Political, poetic, and philosophically searching, and imbued throughout with a deep sensitivity to the physical world, Vandal Love is a breathtaking literary debut about the power of love to create and destroy — in our lives, and in our history. "Over a vast yet beautifully coherent canvas, Vandal Love follows the panic and privilege of human longing through an amazing coalition of loneliness and adaptation. These characters - injured but unbowed, broken but enduring - introduce a gifted new writer. Béchard's surety of voice and confident narrative span declare a first rate novel and an eloquent debut." - Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book, jury comments
"Vandal Love is a generational novel with a difference. It has a magical touch... Complex, perplexing, but lyrical, this is a novel that will sweep you away with its scope, energy and ambition. Only time will tell if Vandal Love is remembered in a decade. My guess is yes." -The Sun Times (Owen Sound)
"Béchard is an ambitious and skillful storyteller. His specialty is finding words to describe longing... The cover blurb for Vandal Love says it is about the power of love, but I thought is was more about blood: what our veins inherit, and how it both holds and haunts us." -Georgia Straight
"Masterful storytelling and heartbreakingly beautiful writing-Vandal Love delivers this and more in an epic tale of love, family, and country. I could not put it down, and when the journey finally ended, I refused to lend my copy and instead bought extras to spread the joy." - Loung Ung, author of Lucky Child and First They Killed My Father.
"The word 'masterpiece' is not to be used lightly, but one is tempted in the case of Vandal Love, for the scope of its ambition, its originality, and its muscular use of language conjure a young Faulkner, Garcia Marquez, or Steinbeck." - Katherine Min, author of Secondhand World
"Although Vandal Love is a first novel, it reads as smoothly as if [Béchard] had a library to his name — mature, lyrical, tactile and at times simple, cruel and sweet... No doubt, the giant steps this young writer has taken will set him far ahead on his literary path."
— Calgary Herald (Interview, 28 Jan 2006)
"D.Y. Béchard surpasses Kerouac in his consciousness of the French as part of a larger people, how their struggle is socially and politically situated rather than strictly personal ... Vandal Love seems like a trans-generational On the Road, which, also infused with a kind of inherited defeatism, was the perfect Americanized expression of an unexamined Existentialism, the ultimate Beat utterance."
-Michel Basilieres, The Globe and Mail
"Lyrical, compelling, moving (both figuratively and literally) the characters in Vandal Love