Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
Marie-Claire Blais was still writing when death came to mow her down on November 30. Augustino or enlightenment would have been the 12e cycle novel Thirsty started in 1995.
The character appears in the fourth title of the seriesBirth of Rebecca in the Age of Tormentbut he and the others will live on, like their creator, through translations and an ever-growing readership.
The last sentence of the unfinished novel, “he was still their king”, without a full stop, leaves room for interpretation. As if the writer gave us a last wink, inviting us to read or re-read Thirstya literary monument beyond category.
” Series Thirsty is infinite, so much is it in dialogue with current events. There was only death to stop Marie-Claire. It’s a very beautiful text, especially for its reflection on death and the afterlife as well as on war, a prophetic idea if we think of Ukraine, ”notes its editor at Boréal, Jean Bernier.
He knew that the writer was returning here to the life of Augustino, a teenage writer à la Rimbaud, who later flew to India to help the poorest. It is with the agreement of the family of Marie-Claire Blais that Boréal was able to make this book its literary testament. And what a testament!
” The cycle Thirsty speaks a lot to today’s young people because Marie-Claire Blais is in direct contact with the world, explains Professor Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, to whom we owe the preface to the book. I saw it in the seminar that I gave and in which she participated. In the book, there is a pandemic that reminds us of what we are going through with COVID, but this is only one example among others. »
“Visionary”
In this novel, as in the whole cycle, the novelist is interested in the excluded, the marginalized, racialized people. It also attacks the powerful, such as the Grand Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, not to name him.
She was a visionary. Already in the previous novel, Little ashes or the capture, she was talking about a serious epidemic long before the coronavirus arose. The cycle Thirsty gives us the impression of having the world before us. There is no distance between the time we read and the time we live.
Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, professor in the department of French-language literature at the University of Montreal
Attentive readers will agree that his latest opus contains more punctuation than most other books by Thirsty. Which takes absolutely nothing away from the imposing breath of the author.
“It’s the first question I would have asked Marie-Claire if I could because her sentences surprised me,” says Jean Bernier. All I can say is that she knew exactly what she was doing while writing. She didn’t touch up the punctuation. »
In Augustino or enlightenment, apart from known or recognizable characters, there is an anonymous “ordinary traveler”, also witness to horrors. In her thousand voices, Marie-Claire Blais was, in fact, an extraordinary traveler attentive to the human condition.
“There is a sequence of all the misfortunes, but the fates of the characters are never unequivocal, explains Mme Nardout-Lafarge. In French, I don’t know of any other examples of this type of literary enterprise. The writing of Thirsty accompanied the world and its survival. As long as there is writing, there is life. »
“Marie-Claire often told me, continues Jean Bernier, that people only remembered her political message and that they forgot to talk about the music, the form, because it was art that she was doing. »
It is in the great literary tradition of Woolf, Proust, Faulkner by reconciling form and content. She flouts the rules and her characters are full of contradictions. Augustino is a portrait of her.
Jean Bernier, editor at Boréal
“A marker of his work”
The opening show of the International Literature Festival (FIL), The writer with a thousand voices – tribute to Marie-Claire Blais, will feature testimonials from Nicole Brossard, Robert Lalonde, Catherine Mavrikakis, Kevin Lambert, Christiane Teasdale and Audrée Wilhelmy. In addition, Florence Blain Mbaye, Marcel Pomerlo, Dominique Quesnel and Monique Spaziani will read excerpts in a reading by Marika Lhoumeau.
The poet, theoretician and novelist Nicole Brossard had known Marie-Claire Blais since 1975. She was able to visit her friend in the winter in Key West for about fifteen years.
“This tribute is like a marker of his work, of his being, of Quebec literature, of North America and of the contemporary world,” she believes. When we celebrate it, we enter a spacious and generous time of the powers of literature, the power of words and of the characters themselves. Marie-Claire is a continuous presence, facing writing and ourselves. »
Augustino or enlightenment will be in bookstores on September 27.
The show The writer with a thousand voices – tribute to Marie-Claire Blais will open on the 28the International Literature Festival on September 23 at the Grande Bibliothèque.
Augustino or enlightenment
Marie Claire Blais
boreal
96 pages