The death of Marie-Claire Blais, who passed away on Tuesday at her home in Key West, shook the entire literary community in Quebec. “Quebec is losing one of its greatest national treasures, a literary genius just like Réjean Ducharme,” said Michel Tremblay, joined Tuesday evening at his home in Florida.
Moreover, in the early 1990s, it was Marie-Claire Blais who convinced Tremblay to come and spend a few weeks in Key West. At the time, the island was a haven for writers and artists in the United States.
“Marie-Claire gave me much of my happiness by introducing me to Key West 30 years ago. I just arrived in Key West [lundi soir] to spend the winter. And I was going to send her a message to have supper with her this week… Her departure is an immense sadness. ”
The boss of the Boréal publishing house where all of Marie-Claire Blais’ books are published, Pascal Assathiany, was “devastated” Tuesday evening. “Under all appearances frail, it was a force of nature, Marie-Claire Blais. She was able to get through a lot of things, ”he told us over the phone, recalling that she had released a new book, A heart inhabited by a thousand voices, barely a month and a half ago.
He was also someone “of extreme generosity and total empathy,” he adds.
She carried the misery of the world on her shoulders. She was always there to defend the underprivileged, the left behind, minorities of all kinds. She was the voice of the voiceless.
Pascal Assathiany, CEO of Boréal
For him, Marie-Claire Blais was “a great voice” and her work finds its place alongside the greatest, Gabrielle Roy, Réjean Ducharme, Anne Hébert.
“She only lived for writing. She was just doing that. I’m sure until the last moment she wrote. When you look at its production, almost a book a year … and this saga of ten books by Thirsts, it’s monumental. She had an extraordinary literary vitality, in addition to being an endearing and free person. ”
“The work of a century”
Marie-Claire Blais has had an influence on all the generations that have followed her, told us for her part the writer Hélène Dorion, who lost her “best friend” on Tuesday.
“We spoke to each other regularly, for two years almost every evening, an hour or two by FaceTime. The last time was Sunday. ”
They even wrote with four hands the libretto for an opera on Marguerite Yourcenar, whose production is underway. The author will have been a model for her, at all levels.
I saw a woman completely devoted to her work as a writer. With all the human qualities that we can guess in her and that I could see from the inside.
Hélène Dorion, writer
What attracted her to Marie-Claire Blais? “A sense of human that I had never met. She deeply loved the human, through its shadows and its lights, its distresses and its hopes. She was a very luminous woman. Hopeful, alive, vibrant, and who gave as a human being as much as what we see that she gives in her work. ”
For Hélène Dorion, the work of Marie-Claire Blais is “the work of a century”. “When you look at his books one after the other, they know how to get ahead of humanity. As if she was telling it to us in advance. In all kinds of ways, in the writing which has kept a contemporary character, which has a vast culture, not just intellectual but human, embodied, rooted. Which brings about a different, singular, and above all benevolent reflection on the world. ”
“Huge” contribution
This is also retained by the professor of literature at the University of Sherbrooke, Isabelle Boisclair: since her beginnings, Marie-Claire Blais has “always gone on the side of the pariahs and the losers, but always with deep empathy”.
“She has done a lot for women, for the LGBTQ community… A young lesbian author at 20 who talks about reverse roles in her first novel The beautiful beast, who later speaks of homosexual interiority… It’s huge, what she did. ”
For Isabelle Boisclair, it was all literature that is in mourning today. “I have never met Marie-Claire Blais, but I have seen her for a long time. And on Friday I have a doctoral student who is defending his masters thesis on it. She was there before I got into literature, and she’s still here, and she just left. It is a very large one. ”
“Nobelizable”
We have often spoken of the Nobel for Marie-Claire Blais, who had “a completely nobelizable profile,” said Pascal Assathiany.
For Isabelle Boisclair, her work can take its place among the great nobelized writers “because of its deep humanity, very inclusive, which embraces humanity in all its diversity, its colors, its weaknesses and its shortcomings”.
It highlights human vulnerabilities, cradles them and embraces them.
Isabelle Boisclair, professor of literature at the University of Sherbrooke
For her friend Hélène Dorion, who was 20 years younger than her, Marie-Claire Blais has always remained deeply young. “She was ageless. I couldn’t see her, not the difference, because she had a remarkable inner and outer youth, and her books were as alive as she was. She was never an old woman, I never saw that. Neither in his words, nor in his writing, nor in his face. Nothing at all. ”
It is for this reason that she succeeded in tackling all current themes, even in her most recent books. And even though she had lived in the United States for decades, that didn’t stop her from being universal.
“She was talking, from a small island, about Earth. Because his work had the capacity to enter into the smallest in order to show the greater. An island was the whole world. ”