The 1984 trilogy recounts the journey of Gabriel Rivages, a protagonist with a hundred trades and the author’s alter ego, following in the footsteps of three twentieth-century American figures. Hungarian-Hollywood Express features Johnny Weissmuller, Olympic swimmer, several times gold medalist and the first Tarzan of talking pictures; Mayonnaise mixes the fate of Rivages with that of the cult writer Richard Brautigan, the last of the beatniks, who haunts the trilogy; and Pomme S is about Steve Jobs, the computer revolution and the secret filiations between ideas, machines and beings.
This single-volume 1984 edition allows us to experience the amplitude and coherence of this romantic adventure, its formal freedom, and gives full resonance to Éric Plamondon’s now recognizable voice, casual and poetic, open to echoes of his beloved works. A reader of Brautigan and Melville, he is in 1984 the novelist of a world in transformation in which Quebec, the Old Continent, the West Coast and, more broadly, the United States orchestrate a collection of stories in which sport and immigration, underground and popular culture, cinema and literature, knowledge and technology are interconnected.
