the earth. In the 1970’s, Blais’s landscapes changed from those of an undefined time and place to a world inhabited by real people who are struggling to find their vision in contemporary society. Her art is a prophetic cry for sanity and peace in a violent world.

During her time in France, Blais wrote two books exploring and celebrating homosexual love. The Wolf is a study of cruelty and love in male relationships, and Nights in the Underground concerns the sacred and self-liberating aspects of lesbian relationships. Blais drew her characters from life in the gay bars and the streets of Montreal and Paris. They live for love and sex and talk about both without inhibition or shame, celebrating this freedom in otherwise unhappy lives.

Moving further from the gothic inner world of Mad Shadows and some of her earlier works, Blais addressed the condition of Quebec as a “colony” of France and the need for a separate French Canadian national identity in St. Lawrence Blues. Written entirely in joual, a form of French street slang, St. Lawrence Blues is a satiric novel about an illegitimate orphan’s life among outcasts in Montreal’s down-and-out working class. Dedicated to the memory of Wilson, it was regarded by American critics as her best work to date when the English translation was published in 1974. Quebec critics were less impressed and were especially hostile toward her use of a literary form of joual as an expression of “nationalist pride.”

Deaf to the City is an observation of travelers and exiles suffering yet surviving through art. It is another experiment with language, written as a long paragraph in wild poetry and prose. Blais again fused these two styles in Anna’s World in the drugged, suicidal torment of a young woman living in an uninhabitable world. Blais’s vision of the world as a truly terrifying and desperate place is also the subject of Pierre, which was critically acclaimed.

In her trilogy consisting of These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, and Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, Blais once again explores themes addressed in her earlier novels. Children damaged by lack of their mother’s love, the effects of overwhelming poverty, homosexual love, the anguish of living, and art as escape all appear in the novels. However, she also treats new themes, including lack of justice and capital punishment, the plight of women and nature, and animals as images of innocence and joy, as well as materialism as an escapist measure. The trilogy attests to Blais’s ability to create prose embodied with a poetic force that transforms it into a song.

Mad Shadows

First published: La Belle bête, 1959 (English translation, 1960)

Type of work: Novel

A surreal tale of tortured relationships between a mother obsessed with her son’s beauty and the unattractive daughter doomed by envy and the shallow nature of her mother’s love.

Mad Shadows, Blais’s first published work, created considerable controversy in Quebec. Many Canadian critics disliked it intensely; others thought it was astonishingly original and brilliant. Set in an unidentified time and place, the story begins on a train, as a young girl watches strangers become captivated by her brother’s beauty. The grotesque, erotic pleasure that the mother takes in her son’s physical beauty is matched only by her indifference toward her daughter, and it sets the tone for the tortured relationships that develop. In Mad Shadows, Blais explores what will become a theme in much of her later work: the creation of evil and the suffering of children caused by the failure of maternal love.

The world that Blais’s characters inhabit is dark and loveless. The first critics and readers were shocked by the utter depravity of the relationships between the mother, her lover, and her children and the starkness of the young author’s vision. Yet the power of her vision and poetic style were undeniable; she was awarded the Prix de la Langue Française from L’Académie Française for Mad Shadows in 1961.

The mother, Louise, an attractive, vain widow, adores and spoils her simple-minded son, Patrice, a reflection of herself. Dimly aware of his own beauty, Patrice seeks his unformed self in every mirrored surface, pond, and window. His sister, Isabelle-Marie, is not beautiful; wounded by her mother’s indifference, her feelings of envy toward her brother begin to overwhelm her. Louise is afflicted by a lesion on her face, a cancerous growth symbolic of the malignancy of her soul. She meets Lanz, an elegant, declining dandy, who becomes her lover; her attentions and affection now go to him, and Patrice, abandoned, rides his horse in a frenzy of jealousy, killing Lanz. In death, Lanz’s shallowness is revealed as his wig and false beard disintegrate around him. Even so, Louise feels little rancor toward her son, the “beautiful beast.”

Among Blais’s recurring themes is the end of innocence and the fall from grace inherent in sexual awakening. For her characters, all consequences of love are tragic; in Mad Shadows, there is a sense that human beings are doomed at the moment of awareness and that happiness is illusory. For a short time, miraculously, Isabelle-Marie finds happiness in the love of a young blind man, Michael. Sight, symbolic of truth, would not allow the illusion of love to survive in Blais’s nightmarish world; fearing rejection, Isabelle-Marie deceives Michael into believing that she is beautiful. They marry and have a daughter, Anne, and for a time enjoy a kind of simple happiness. When his sight suddenly returns, Michael discovers his wife’s deception. Unable to hide his anger, he cruelly abandons Isabelle-Marie and their child, and, in misery, they return to Louise’s farm.

Driven by her rejection and envy, Isabelle-Marie disfigures her brother by pushing his face into a pot of boiling water. No longer a beautiful object, Patrice is rejected by his mother and sent to an asylum, proving the shallowness of her love. Seeing his grotesque face in a lake’s surface, Patrice is horrified and drowns in his own reflection. His suffering gives Isabelle-Marie some satisfaction, but even this does not bring her peace. Mad Shadows ends in a final act of suicidal despair, as Isabelle-Marie sets her mother’s farm on fire and waits to throw herself under a train, leaving her young daughter to wander alone on the tracks.

A Season in the Life of Emmanuel

First published: Une Saison dans la vie d’Emmanuel, 1965 (English translation, 1966)

Type of work: Novel

Newborn Emmanuel, the sixteenth child of an impoverished Quebec farmer, is witness to the suffering of his siblings and the ways in which each rebels against fate.

A Season in the Life of Emmanuel was declared by critics to have been both “written by the devil” and among the best French Canadian novels. Blais moves her character from an earlier imaginary, gothic world into the recognizable world of French Canadian culture. The story takes place during the first year in the life of Emmanuel, the sixteenth child of a materially and emotionally impoverished farm family. Bleak, disturbing, and full of biting humor, this depiction of Quebec’s church-dominated lower-class life is considered Blais’s masterwork.

Blais begins the story with a constantly changing point of view, as the mother of this brood of children, some called only by their birth order number, gives birth to Emmanuel and then returns to work in the fields. The strongest influence in the lives of the children is their grandmother, the rigid and traditional caretaker of their futures. The mother has no name, no presence in the book, though her absence and failure are clearly felt as she moves through life exhausted and resigned to her wretched state. Maternal failure is a theme common to Blais’s work, which often presents a world where children are limited and defined by their emotional and physical deprivation.

The main character in this novel is not Emmanuel but four of the older children. It is through his eyes that one sees their suffering, and none escapes the evil in the world. Heloise, believing that the sensuality that she experiences in adolescence is a religious calling, goes first to a convent, then to a brothel. Two of Heloise’s brothers are sentenced to life in a reformatory, where they are molested by predatory priests and then made to suffer the stupefying life of factory work, accepting the inevitability of their fate. Jean-Le-Maigre, the most alive and creative of the brood, ends his short life in a sanatorium; his journal is the only evidence of his existence, as his death, like his life, becomes nothing more than another family burden.

Obsessed with death, the repression of children, and the perversion of religious authority, Blais’s vision is one of stifled lives and the responses of suffering children, suffering sometimes with great joy and grace to the constant evil that they encounter in the adult world. Her realistic style fascinated French critics in particular. Playing with language, often with ironic and biting humor, she renders both depravity and grace with naturalistic detail, which is especially poignant in the emotional expression of the suffering of fragile children. For many of Blais’s characters, as in her own life, language and the act of writing are symbolic paths to salvation, forestalling spiritual death and madness. The humorous and touching autobiographical writings of Emmanuel’s brother Jean-Le-Maigre are part of the structure of the book. Dying of consumption, his poems express his vitality and symbolize his rebellion against fate.

These Festive Nights

First published: Soifs, 1995 (English translation, 1997)

Type of work: Novel

Characters from different socioeconomic classes participate in a three-day-and-night celebration while trying to escape from and come to terms with the humancondition.

In These Festive Nights, Blais combines the technique of stream of consciousness with an omniscient narrator, permitting her to take the reader from the mind of one character to another in a continuous flow of thought and language. She uses repetitive images and descriptions of the characters to make the shifts without interruption to her text or confusion for the reader. Long sentences, often multiple pages in length, broken only by commas, reinforce the ceaseless flow of the work.

The novel depicts a disparate set of characters, all of whom are in some way interconnected, yet all living very different lives socially, economically, and intellectually. There are the wealthy, well-educated (Renata, Claude Mère, and Melanie, Daniel, and their children Samuel, Vincent, and Augustino); the intellectuals and artists (Jacques, Charles, Fréderic, Jean-Mathieu, Caroline, Suzanne, and Adrien); the ill or dying (Renata, Vincent, Jacques, Fréderic, and Jean-Mathieu); the aging (Mère, Renata, Charles, Fréderic, Adrien, Suzanne, Caroline, and Jean-Mathieu); the refugees (Julio, Eduardo, Jenny, and Marie-Sylvie and her brother); the poor African Americans (Pastor Jeremy, Mama, Carlos, Le Toqué, Venus, and Uncle Cornelius); and the homosexuals (Jacques, Tanjou, Luc, and Paul). The characters portray variants of the human condition, all tainted by suffering and death, and attempt to escape, to find happiness or at least peace in life.

The novel is structured on the juxtaposition of opposites. The setting of the story is an island in the Gulf of Mexico. Surrounded by the sea, it is a natural paradise filled with beautiful plants, birds, animals, and pleasant weather. However, danger, death, and suffering are ever present. The sea provides beauty and pleasure but can kill. The enclosed estate of Daniel and Melanie assures safety from predators within its confines, but just outside the estate, hooded figures prowl and hiss. The life of Samuel, who has everything material, contrasts sharply with the life of the impoverished Carlos. However, both suffer from a lack of true affection from either father or mother. For his parents, Samuel is “something” to be exhibited; Carlos’s parents view him as no good.

Illness, old age, death, and impending death play significant roles in the novel. Characters are haunted by images of death: families lost at sea, war atrocities, bombings, mutilations, hangings, and executions in the electric chair and by lethal injection. Both Jacques, who is dying from acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), and Fréderic, incapacitated by old age, can no longer care for themselves. Fréderic and Mère have memory loss.

Through the characters of Mère and Renata, Blais examines the particular problems confronting women in a patriarchal society. Both Mère and Renata have experienced rejection by their husbands because they no longer possessed the attractiveness of youth. Renata speaks of herself as a vagabond, running away from fate. For her, injustice will always be a woman’s fate, and a woman will always be seen as guilty for causing her own misery. Mère is obsessed with the need for women to become leaders, to change the world.

The novel ends with Mère listening to Venus and Samuel singing “O may my joy endure.”

Thunder and Light

First published: Dans la foudre et la lumière, 2001 (English translation, 2001)

Type of work: Novel

The sequel to These Festive Nights, the novel probes deeper into the torments of the human condition and the difficulty of escaping it.

In Thunder and Light, Blais continues the stories of many of the characters that she introduced in These Festive Nights, but here she concentrates more on what actually happens to the characters than on what they are thinking. She also adds characters drawn from or based upon actual events recorded in news reports.

The novel begins with Carlos running with his dog Polly. Carlos is determined to get even with Lazaro, an Egyptian immigrant who used to be his friend. Carlos intends to frighten him with an unloaded gun, but as fate will have it the gun is loaded and Carlos shoots Lazaro in the knee. He becomes what Pastor Jeremy and Mama always said he would—a no-good and a criminal.

Through the characters of Lazaro and Caroline’s companion Charly, Blais addresses the problem of the ever-recurring cycle of violence in the world. Lazaro swears to have revenge for Carlos’s act. His mother unsuccessfully tells him he must forgive Carlos, otherwise all of her actions have been pointless. His mother had rebelled against the unjust religious law that permitted her Muslim husband to confine and beat her. Lazaro, however, refuses to listen and rejects his mother. He was born Muslim and male and his heritage calls for vengeance. Charly, a Jamaican descendant of slaves, voices the same desire for revenge based on heritage. Carlos’s sister Venus is also victimized by the circumstances of her birth. Venus had escaped a life of poverty by marrying a rich drug dealer, Captain Williams, but the captain has been killed and she now finds herself at the mercy of the captain’s estate manager, Richard, who has her trapped in the house.

In this novel, Blais deals at length with the impossibility of eliminating suffering and anguish from human life. She juxtaposes characters who try to relieve suffering and characters who escape from it in art, creativity, and beauty. Asoka is a monk who every day witnesses the anguish and death of innocent people, especially children, as he ministers to the victims of war, while his brother Ari devotes himself to sculpting. Caroline, a photographer, has always photographed only beautiful people and objects. She refuses to record images of the victims of violence, war, and starvation, in contrast to the photojournalists, who with their photographs stamp these images into the minds of their readers.

The memorial service for Jean-Mathieu returns to the problem of mortality and God in a suffering world. Caroline muses on the death of her friend, on the exile of each person from the sensual world, and on the sense of loss and absence that comes to each individual.

Blais returns to the stream-of-consciousness technique she employed in These Festive Nights in her analysis of the impossibility of justice in the world and the cruelty of capital punishment. Tormented by the willingness of most judges to pronounce the death penalty, Renata thinks of nothing else as she prepares for a conference on the topic.