About "Generation A".

I like Douglas Coupland’s stories very much, especially when there are parts taking place in Vancouver, with allusions to local landmarks that readers do not necessarily know about unless they’ve been here. No Vancouver in “Generation A” though. However, there are a few scenes in Geneva and Meyrin-the village/little town/suburb where the CERN and the airport are (although the airport is really in Cointrin, but Cointrin is truly part of Meyrin), the place that is connected to Geneva’s town centre via the number 9 bus. Of course, people may not know about it unless they’ve been there.
There is one thing that I found very peculiar in the Meyrin chapter. Namely, the local police are said to be speaking in a “Swiss Canton patois”. I realize that the story takes place sometime in the future, and things may have changed by the time our good old Serge gets arrested after damaging the LHC. However, I doubt that there will ever be a “Swiss Canton patois”, given that there are 26 cantons (a fact that is very unlikely to change any time soon), and that at the moment no real “patois” exists in the canton of Geneva. People speak French, sometimes even without any distinctive accent, and less slowly than in most other cantons. Of course they say septante-trois and nonante-six (but definitely not huitante), and they store their food in the frigo instead of the Frigidaire, they may shoot a puck with a canne instead of a crosse, and they may spend some time clearing up all the chenil that’s on their desk. Yet they do, most certainly, speak proper French, and in spite of the disappearance of bees, I can’t imagine how a whole region would switch to a different language in a matter of a decade or so.
What happened to my dear city in the meantime? Is the Boulangerie du Pont-d’-Arve still there? Have its employees switched to this new language as well?

Oh well. I keep reading. The book is fun. It’s clever. Interesting. I am starting to crave apples. And then suddenly it mentions no the Decameron, no less. One of the greatest books ever written, the book that any student in an Italian-speaking middle or high school secretly enjoys and appreciates. The Number One on the list of forbidden books during the Inquisition. The book where everything revolves around food, cheating, tricking, lust, sex and cleverly getting away with murder. One of the few books, I think, to have a first name (“Decameron”) and a last name (“Principe Galeotto”). So, why does the smart Samantha get incorrect Decameron information off the web? As we learn in grade 9, the book is comprised of 100 short stories told by ten young people, seven women and three men; how come Serge does not notice the discrepancy? One would expect him to know this kind of stuff, and if poor Samantha stumbled upon an incorrect piece of information, he could at least let her know. So smart and educated you are not, then, Dr Serge. Not that I particularly liked you anyway.

Somehow, I am so bothered by the patois and the seven people Decameron that the minor Solon incongruity becomes an insignificant detail. In fact, the wonders of this alleged small nuclear ribonucleoprotein seem far more likely than the sudden introduction of a new cantonal language, or the fact that Serge does not seem to have his Decameron facts right.
Well, it happens.

I go on with the book, I am sitting at a Blenz Coffee on Davie, sipping a dark hot chocolate. And suddenly, the scenery changes, we go South, all the way to Locarno. This book is starting to freak me out. This is where I was born. The “city” of the Film Festival. The city of the freezing cold outdoor swimming pool (which no longer is), of the constant influx of tourists, of the lake and the little beaches with their broken glass…. And I discover something else. The whole lake is frozen. No wonder the bees have disappeared (if you’ve ever been to Locarno in the winter, and tried to go ice skating on the lake, you’ll know why I am saying this).

Montpellier is spelled “Montpelier”, which I assume is the town’s English name or the result of an orthographic reform, but I barely notice it. Rabbit, still part of the traditional Canton Ticino dishes in 2010, is “kind of cool” in Trevor’s days –oh well. I smile and tell myself that Trevor is a weird guy with a skewed view of “cool” and besides, he was still in France at the time of the rabbit incident. Monaco and Genoa aren’t technically on the Mediterranean sea (unless one counts the Mar Ligure as part of the Mar nostrum), but I should really shut up because it’s just matter of a Mediterranean view. And “Lyons” may very well be some town that I don’t know and that has nothing to do with Lyon.
I can’t help feeling for the poor kids who are wrestling with one of those bastard unclonable genes, as this furiously reminds me of the XbaI fragment on which I eventually had to give up way back when. I cringe a bit at Serge’s statement that his five “friends” are made of DNA, but even that fails to truly annoy me.

Right now, I just start to feel relieved that the connections to my life are slowly being diluted out. I think about all the people of Montpellier and Madrid, and those who have lived in Paris and North Bay and who love apples and the Internet.