Explosions

Overview

Mathieu Poulin brings us an action comedy of a novel, starring big-budget, explosion-happy movie director Michael Bay. What if Bay were, against all odds, a misunderstood genius right up there with the likes of Plato, Sartre, and Nietzsche? What if his films were more than just Baydiocre, high-grossing box-office successes held in low esteem by most movie critics? What if Bad Boys was a film about decolonization? What if The Rock was about failing to be recognized by one's peers? If Armageddon was about a post-human future? And Pearl Harbor was a reflection on the freedom afforded an artist when striving to transform fact into fiction? Poulin takes his hypothesis and runs with it. Bayhem ensues as our leading man sets out in hot pursuit of the truth, finding more questions than answers between epic car chases and sexy love interests. Who are his real parents and why did they abandon him? Who keeps following him? Did someone intentionally try to poison him, aware of his deathly allergy to sesame? And most importantly: What is meaning?

Reviews

"An unusual mixture of biography, comedy, action, and analysis, Explosions takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to one of the most popular but artistically dismissed film directors working today. (...) an amusing work of film criticism." —Daniel Schindel, Foreword Reviews

"The overlap here between formal aesthetics and metaphysics in the Aristotelian sense is useful to understanding how Explosions works, but it doesn't quite capture the novel's pulse. This is a very, very, funny book." —Scott Beauchamp, An Aggregate of Moments 

"Explosions is a thrilling read and Jensen's sharp and lyrical translation lives up to the promise of Poulin's excellent confidence trick of a narrative. The balance between a plot that frequently and deliberately jumps the shark and characters that almost universally take themselves and each other so painfully seriously is a difficult one to achieve in any language, and Explosions almost always succeeds brilliantly." —Julia Peterson, Reading in Translation

Author Biography

Born in 1983, Mathieu Poulin preferred movies to books for the longest time. He teaches literature in Montreal and began writing only recently. Explosions is his first novel. Aleshia Jensen is a Montreal-based translator and former bookseller. Explosions is her first translation of a novel.