SOURCE: "Unfinished Business," in Books in Canada, Vol. 17, No. 1, January-February, 1988, pp. 21-2.

In the review below, Bednarski remarks on the sense of loss and despair in La conférence inachevée.

At the time of Jacques Ferron's death in 1985 no major new book by him had been published in Quebec for many years. The silence was troubling and eloquent in the case of a writer whose voice had been resonant throughout the 1960s and '70s. The old books—the fantastical novels, the essays, and the contes, by now living classics—were consistently reprinted, but there was nothing from the present, nothing to indicate that the great work could be continued or renewed.

Most readers knew that Ferron was going through a period of painful personal crisis and that he had effectively withdrawn from public life. But he had not given up writing, and before he died he...