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The Last Indian Summer is the story of Michel, a teenage boy who relates the summer when Kanak, his native friend, helped him discover life, passion and nature. Michel’s village is a prison where life is feared, where duty and hypocrisy are the fashion. He wants to break free, to leave the village and be reborn somewhere else. Kanak will become the witchdoctor of his rebirth by introducing him to freedom, nature and forbidden games – a symbolic union where Michel absorbs Native culture and finds a balance between the spiritual and natural worlds. But Michel’s relation with Kanak shocks the village because it involves an Indian – a pagan spawned by “goddamned pig-headed savages.” For his crime, Michel is forbidden from seeing the Indian and will be shipped off to school in the fall to forget his summer of discovery. But he refuses to be exiled to some seminary to study Latin and learn amnesia.
A post-colonial novel of protest, The Last Indian Summer is a bewitching and beautiful summer night’s dream, a hymn to passion, nature and freedom that condemns hypocrisy and intolerance. Winner of France's 1982 Prix Jean-Macé, it is Robert Lalonde's second novel.
An actor, playwright and translator, Robert Lalonde is one of Quebec’s leading novelists. His previous novels published in translation by Ekstasis Editions include The Ogre of Grand Remous, The Devil Incarnate, One Beautiful Day to Come, The Whole Wide World and Seven Lakes Further North. | |