It was 2019, when last I wrote about Marie-Claire Blais here: about A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (Trans. Derek Coltman) for the #1965Club.

It’s a skinny little novel, Emmanuel is a skinny little kid: it’s a powerful story about the forces that shape us, from family to church to imagination.

It was her fifth book, and Wikipedia tells me it won the Prix Médicis and the Prix Jean-Hamelin in 1976 and was nominated for Le Combat des livres in Quebec in 2008 (like “Survivor”, but for books). Her first, Mad Shadows (1959, translated by Merloyd Lawrence) was adapted into both a ballet and a film, nearly thirty years apart.

Despite all the hard work of translators, publishers, festival organisers, and various other literary folk, there remains a divide between French-language and English-language Canadian literature. Even key Francophone writers are not necessarily well-known in Anglo-Canada, even when they win major national literary awards, but in some ways Blais is better known overseas than in North America.

Pasha Malla, writing about Blais in “The New Yorker” asks: “Will American Readers Ever Catch on to Marie-Claire Blais?” His article was written about five years ago, but in an effort to place Blais with her contemporaries, he quotes Margaret Atwood on her first experience reading Blais:

“The book made me very uneasy, for more than the obvious reasons: the violence, the murders, suggestions of incest and the hallucinatory intensity of the writing were rare in Canadian literature in those days, but even scarier was the thought that this bloodcurdling fantasy, as well as its precocious verbal skill, were the products of a girl of 19. I was 19 myself, and with such an example before me I already felt like a late bloomer.”

In recent years I’ve read five of her novels (all in translation), but my first exposure to her was the first volume of what would become a ten-book-long cycle: Soifs, translated into English as These Festive Nights by Sheila Fischman (1995; 1997).

Browsing the library back then, even well-established writers like Blais were unrecognisable to me. So I had no thought in my mind when I borrowed this off the “new books” display, and I would have made my decision based on the title and cover—both illustration and description. (Malla notes that its literal translation is “Thirstings”.) Neither of those elements prepared me for what I found inside: the longest sentence I’d ever seen.

Malla describes the cycle like this: “The emotional texture of the novels, pitched between anxiety and longing, feels emphatically contemporary, but Blais’s style, in her later years, is mostly indebted to the modernists: the Woolf of “The Waves”; Proust, in his approach to recollection; Faulkner, in his use of polyphony.”

He notes contrasting and complex themes (from addiction to community, from love to the threat of nuclear annihilation), he does the math for us, noting that the works combined are more than two thousand pages. He describes her way of weaving the volumes together, by pointing out a group of drag queens who gather in the fifth volume, with their reappearance seven hundred pages later, in exactly the same location:

“Perhaps it’s the same instant, slightly recast, or the repetition of a ritual on a different night. But what is conveyed most strikingly is less the linear chronology of life than something like an eternal present, or the simultaneity of dreams.”

These novels are less focussed (than her other fiction) on contemporary horrors, Malla writes, and more on “the effects of those horrors on human consciousness” and they “seem both to encompass entire lives and to take place in the course of a single day.” The idea of their being more character-focussed appeals to me; even with experimental narratives, if I can hold onto a character, I can find a way into the story.

The tenth and final book in her Soifs series was published in French in 2018, and she died in 2021; it has just been published in English, Together by the Sea, translated by Katia Grubisic.

I never made it to the end of that first sentence I encountered in These Festive Nights back then, so this is my next attempt. (I don’t actually believe the book is written in a single sentence, and I’ll be embarrassed if I find it’s actually just many lines long and ends on the next page.)

When the series was in the midst of being translated, I picked up a copy of Mai, not realising it was part of the cycle, but some of the other books had fallen out of print. They’re all available now, and I’m set to begin. In this moment, I’m thinking about reading a book each month, but it’s hard to predict from this vantage point.

Blais herself left time between each volume (whether writing or publishing), which is an argument for easing the pace of this project. But I also love observing the kind of subtle interconnections that Malla describes, which is an argument for quickening the pace.

LMK if you have read these—or would like to—and, if not, I’d love to hear what cycles (or series) of stories you have read or plan to read.

  • 1 Soifs (1995) Trans. Sheila Fischman as These Festive Nights (2018) 312p 9781487004583
  • 2 Dans la foudre et la lumière (2001) Trans. Nigel Spencer as Thunder and Light (2019) 216p 9781487004255
  • 3 Augustino et le chœur de la déstruction (2005) Trans. Nigel Spencer as Augustino and the Choir of Destruction (2007) 232p 9780887847523
  • 4 Naissance de Rebecca à l’ère des tourments (2008) Trans. Nigel Spencer as Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom (2009) 216p 9780887848254
  • 5 Mai au bal des prédateurs (2010) Trans. Nigel Spencer as Mai at the Predators’ Ball (2012) 256p 9781770890053
  • 6 Le jeune homme sans avenir (2012) Trans. Nigel Spencer as Nothing for You Here, Young Man (2014) 232p 9781770893573
  • 7 Aux jardins des Acacias (2014) Trans. Nigel Spencer as The Acacia Gardens (2016) 184p 9781487000172
  • 8 Le festin au crépuscule (2015) Trans. Nigel Spencer as A Twilight Celebration (2019) 288p 9781487002480
  • 9 Des chants pour Angel (2017) Trans. Katias Grubisic as Songs for Angel (2021) 184p 9781487006327
  • 10 Une réunion près de la mer (2018) Trans. Katia Grubisic as Together by the Sea (2026)
    306p 9781487006358

Soifs Series by Marie-Claire Blais (in translations by Sheila Fischman, Nigel Spencer, and Katia Grubisic): These Festive Nights | Thunder and Light | Augustino and the Choir of Destruction | Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom | Mai at the Predators’ Ball | Nothing for You Here, Young Man | The Acacia Gardens | A Twilight Celebration | Songs for Angel | Together by the Sea