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Engineer leads second life as author
Earthquake engineer Michel Bruneau has just published his second work of fiction, a novel called “Shaken Allegiances.” Photo: DOUGLAS LEVERE
Asked if he remembers when he began writing, Michel Bruneau, engineering professor and former director of MCEER, replies, “I’ve always been writing.”
“Why I write, though, is a tricky question,” continues Bruneau, who recently released his second work of fiction, a 420-page novel called “Shaken Allegiances” that details the escapades of an eclectic cast of characters in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake on Montréal Island a week before a referendum on Québec’s secession from Canada. The Québec City-born author's first book, a volume in his native French, carried the title “Inhumanité—Onze Nouvelles qui Insultent l’Intellignence,” which translates to “Inhumanity—Eleven Short Stories that Insult Intelligence.”
“It’s not easy to explain why one writes,” Bruneau says, “because it seems to be instinctive or impulsive in a way. But you sometimes feel you have your own entertaining and crazy way of seeing the world, and it’s fun to share that. When I wrote the previous book, which was a collection of short stories, a lot of people told me that they really enjoyed it because it made them question the thinness of the line between insanity and human folly—the plain dumb things we sometimes do.”
For Bruneau, who headed MCEER, the national center for earthquake engineering and extreme events research headquartered at UB, from 2003 to 2008, writing is not just some frivolous avocation. Upon publication in 1998, his short stories received warm reviews from the popular Radio-Canada.
In a question-and-answer on his Web site titled “Shouldn’t engineers stick to engineering (after all, engineers can’t write)?” Bruneau explains his passion for writing: “Fiction provides (a) wonderful outlet that allows near infinite freedom for construction or destruction possibilities. Whereas engineering must operate within very strict rules and constraints, slaved to rather orderly processes, in fiction, it’s possible to disturb the order, to throw the checkerboard in the air, see where the pieces land, and work with that.”
His work, with its blend of deadpan humor and troupe of corrupt protagonists—“quixotic, ambitious, rapacious, self-righteous, naïve, conceited, moronic, lost or otherwise flawed,” Bruneau writes of them in a synopsis of his novel—offers a glimpse into his world, his way of thinking. Some readers have told him that his work seems to draw inspiration from the absurdist literature movement. Indeed, Bruneau counts the dark and deeply cynical “Waiting for Godot” among his favorite plays and the existential Franz Kafka among his favorite authors.
In conversation, Bruneau does not come across as the brooding type. Though deliberate and full of serious thoughts, he cracks jokes frequently to lift the mood. Still, he sees the misanthropic undertone of his writing as reflective of reality. He notes, for instance, that following Hurricane Katrina, Michael Brown, then director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, “was very concerned about image,” mirroring the vanity and self-centeredness that the characters in “Shaken Allegiances” exhibit.
“They’re converging (on Montréal Island) to make their own human disaster on top of the human disaster that exists,” Bruneau says. “They’re all converging there because there’s something for them…It’s not science fiction. This is how people really behave.”
The unsettling portrait of the world and humanity that Bruneau the writer proffers is, perhaps, closer to reality than we would like to think. Take it from Bruneau the structural engineer.
“I’ve been working in the field of disasters for decades now,” he says, “and it’s always striking to see the enormous role that human nature plays to set up disasters so they become worse. I mean, fundamentally, an earthquake is nothing. It just shakes the ground for a few minutes. It may create a tsunami, which is a different story. (But) it’s the entire infrastructure that we build to shelter ourselves from nature that collapses and kills us. So there’s a disconnect there…When you throw in human nature, our own reaction is always to react after the fact. When are building codes changed? After the earthquake—not before.”
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