Running on Fumes

Description

When the electricity inexplicably goes out nationwide, the mundanities of life gradually shift to the rigours of survival. In this post-apocalyptic setting, an unnamed mechanic jumps into his beat-up car and drives east, journeying 4,736 kilometres to reach his dying father. As the narrator's journey becomes one of essentials gasoline, water bottles, and gas-station food and as the crisis engulfing his surroundings begins to weigh on him ever more, he seeks refuge in a woman, and later, with a fellow traveler he meets on the road. These two kindred souls join him on his path, though they seem to seek a different sort of redemption. As the road grows longer, and the narrator's exhaustion grows in kind, parallels are drawn between his own journey through this labyrinth and Theseus's journey through the primeval Labyrinth. However, the beast that our narrator seeks to slay might not be one of flesh and horn and blood, but instead of his own failing mental state, of his thirst for this apocalypse around him. In the end, the obsession with which he pursues this beast which he will ultimately find will be his undoing. Running on Fumes is a road novel that carries with it influences of the genre, with their storylines of redemption through distance travelled, often in a failing world that reflects the protagonist's interior. The line that delineates whether the world is reflecting the narrator's state or whether the narrator's mindset is reflected by the world is hazy, and there remains a level of uncertainty on the truths the narrator speaks.

Christian Guay-Poliquin was born in Saint-Armand in 1982. He is now developing a thesis project on the hunting narrative and also works in renovation. The pencil behind his ear serves to mark his measures as much as it does to record his ideas. Les fil de kilometres (La Peuplade, 2013) is his first novel, now published in English as Running on Fumes. Born and raised in Montreal, Jacob Homel has translated or collaborated in the translation of a number of works, including Nelly Arcan's Hysteric and Breakneck, The Battle of London and The Last Genet. In 2012, he won the J.I. Segal Translation Prize for his translation of A Pinch of Time. He currently lives in Montreal.

"[A] great road story."--Geist magazine "Brilliant and well-mastered writing."--La Presse "My excitement grew as the kilometres passed ..."--Litterature du Quebec