Marie-Claire Blais died on November 30, 2021. “Inconsolable at the departure of this angel of consolation”, says Pierre Filion in his beautiful preface to Tomb, Normand Chaurette began to write a text of empathy around this tutelary figure. Four days before his own death, on August 31, 2022, he will give the publisher a great little book of passion, coming from an unfailing admiration for an author whom, already a teenager, he mythologized.
From his reading of The beautiful beasteverything is already assumed in front of this perennial flower of wonder which, in him, will make hatch his desire to write, he who was constantly alarmed by his inability to reach the perfect ideal of this voice. He recognizes himself through this character: “The same woman was our mother. The same man, our father. Only one monster was our only parent. »
The book will thus go in a style of great purity, often of a perfectly mastered poetry. “Have I ever let go of what hurts me? asks Chaurette in the face of the violence, the astounding talent that tortures him in this author with an endless breath. “Crying sun indifferent to the dead”, certain places of fiction catch and strike down. What he says of Monique Bosco, pedagogue, could also be addressed to Marie-Claire Blais: “icon! / without demonstrating it, she was reaching the goal, / to make us ruthlessly ourselves”.
“Have I ever let go of what hurts me? “, asks Chaurette in the face of the violence, the astounding talent that tortures him in this author with an endless breath.
This disturbing paragraph at the end of the course: “One never loves too much. You are dead now that time has decided it, and I remain vigilant of my own time, not understanding why I am still sentimental and happy in a thirst for life that is still allotted to me, when Madame Bosco, Jovette [Marchessault], you and all those who assembled me are, definitively, gone, and who ask me the question what I am for. To be assuredly this immense author of queensthe one who observed so well the Indiana Crossinglistened so well The little Köchel.
On the eve of his own destiny, he writes quite simply: “I miss you. “And to foresee this immediate future which will deprive us of him: “We were you and I horrible, strange, proudly dissatisfied with our fates, because it is necessary to die, and sometimes it is long to wait, to wait after the death […] “She will come, she is there very close, after the last words put in the end of this beautiful book: “we are all going to our ice cream shares”.