Novels of novelists, mothers and sons

Gilles Archambault's "novelists' novels" - rather than autofictions or autobiographical narratives - are inseparable from his collections of short columns, articles and prose writings of various kinds. All of these genres or series are hybrids in the manner of many contemporary texts, combining personal memory and literary history, self-criticism and a new (oblique) look at institutions, society and the world. Two books by Archambault - a novel, Les choses d'un jour (1991) and a narrative, Un apres-midi de septembre (1993) - involve a problematic family triangle. The characters of the mother, the son and - in the background - the father play a fundamental and structural part in shaping the relationship of the author (who becomes the Author) with writing, successive or simultaneous identities, and the new construction of the subject. Novels within the novel? - or fragments of the Novel that is to come (like the autobiography or the essay) and that is already there.