In 2021, on November 30, left us abruptly Mary-Claire Blais, one of the greatest voices in Quebec literature. She leaves a legacy of unclassifiable work, carried by an unshakeable narrative spirit and by the courage to descend into the depths of humanity, to look monstrosity in the face in order to better welcome and decipher it, to become one with the world and time by embracing its greatest wounds.
Her friends and collaborators have affirmed it on many occasions: only death could tear Marie-Claire Blais away from writing – an art which seemed to her a movement inscribed in expansion and infinitude.
From this forever unfinished work comes to us these days a last fragment — Augustino or enlightenment — on which the author was working when she left us. These some 96 pages are added to the vast literary collection that is the cycle Thirstya series of eleven novels whose publication spanned from 1995 to 2020 which probes human misery and places in dialogue the greatest tragedies of the XXe century and the issues that define and transform today’s world.
We reconnect with Augustino, discovered, as a kid, in the very first book of the series. Thirsty (1995). Four years old, frightened by the reports on the first Gulf War, he already worries about the end of humanity. Animated since by this tragic conscience, we meet him again in the third volume, Augustino and the Chorus of Destruction (2005). Having become a writer, he wrote his first novel, Letter to young people without a future, a relentless denunciation of the state of the world. Then, he gradually disappears from the novels, to exist only in the memories and questions of the other characters.
This time, Marie-Claire Blais captures him in the present, in India, a humanitarian worker working with the wounded and dying ravaged by leprosy of an unknown nature, from which he himself is afflicted. Carried away by the chaos – and by the ample phrasing of the writer -, he remembers the tragic fate of his ancestors who perished in the death camps and imagines, in a new literary project, the thoughts of a soldier back from Vietnam, breaking with those of the Honorable Grand Secretary, responsible for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
original manuscript
The publisher has chosen to offer readers a text which — although unfinished — is as close as possible to the manuscript on which Marie-Claire Blais was still working a few days before her death. “On the one hand, that’s how we worked together,” says Jean Bernier, publishing director at Boréal and accomplice of the novelist since the very beginning of the cycle. Thirsty. “When she submitted her manuscripts, all the work was already done. She had an extremely precise idea of what she wanted to publish. Moreover, his work is so atypical that one cannot begin to cut here and there. Everything is to be taken, to be accepted as it is in all its requirements. I therefore take on the role of passer here. »
When she deposited her manuscripts, all the work was already done. She had an extremely precise idea of what she wanted to publish. Moreover, his work is so atypical that one cannot begin to cut here and there. Everything is to be taken, to be accepted as it is in all its requirements. I therefore take on the role of passer here.
For Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge, professor in the Department of French Studies at the University of Montreal, the decision to close the cycle with an open work seems logical and respectful of the thought of Marie-Claire Blais. “This accidental end, brought about by death, realizes the very movement of Thirsty, which suggests a potentially infinite expansion. The whole cycle works on this idea that there is no possible conclusion: nothing ends, neither the sentences, nor the paragraphs, nor the index at the end of the tenth novel. Here, we close the book with a sentence without a dot, as if suspended in its tracks. There is something very moving in that. »
In line with its predecessors
Augustino or enlightenment otherwise does not need to be completed to enroll in anything the cycle Thirsty is more grandiose, both formally and thematically, as well as through the constant dialogue it establishes with the world around us. “Each work in the series is like a piece of crystal. In each of them, we find the same organized, repetitive and strong structure as in the whole”, salutes Jean Bernier.
We thus find there the singular poetry of the cycle, the same narrative breath, the same ample phrasing and almost devoid of punctuation which makes the voices alternate in a bewitching rhythm. The author delves into certain themes and visions mentioned elsewhere, including the Holocaust, slavery, the disintegration of the shuttle Columbiathe aftereffects of the Vietnam War and the life-saving power of art.
“As in previous novels, the horrors of the past are not relegated to history. They are invoked in connection, in dialogue, in echo with what is happening today – the pandemic, the refugee crisis, radicalization – and reveal the links that unite the operations of destruction beyond the eras, the dehumanization and the indifference that make them possible,” says Élisabeth Nardout-Lafarge.
Throughout the series, Marie-Claire Blais also liked to give us to read the thoughts and motives of controversial characters, executioners, criminals and others responsible for horrors. Here, we have access to the justifications of the honorable Grand Secretary, retired to a ranch in Mexico, alter ego of Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense under George W. Bush, who launched the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
It joins a whole series of figures, both fictitious and historical, encountered throughout Thirsty, like Wrath, a former pedophile priest, Robert Oppenheimer, the inventor of the atomic bomb, or Herta Oberheuser, a doctor who took part in Nazi medical experiments in the concentration camps. ” The cycle Thirsty does not exclude anything or anyone. By recalling that the executioners are also humans, that they too were children, Marie-Claire Blais refuses to place evil on the outside, as a stranger before humanity. It is inherent there, and is somewhere in each of us, ”adds the professor.
This last fragment left as a legacy brings together everything that makes Marie-Claire Blais one of the greatest and dazzling writers of Quebec literature. “Again, in a few fabulously beautiful pages, it seemed like she had seen what lay ahead: the pandemic, the war in Iraq. She was so in tune with the world and its stutters that she could predict what was to come. Writing was his whole life. Now we just have to be grateful,” concludes Jean Bernier.