Marie-Claire Blais or the death of a queen |The press

By fashionlifeshopping 06/07/2022 1270 Views

I thought she was going to write up to 100 years old, at least.Or until the Swedish Academy awards the Nobel of literature.Each year, I was ready for this announcement, in a crazy hope, because it fulfilled all the criteria.In particular for what Alfred Nobel said of this prize which must reward a work rendering service to humanity and "which shows a powerful ideal".

Publié le 2 déc. 2021

L’œuvre de Marie-Claire Blais embrassait l’humanité entière dans ce qu’il y a de plus beau et de plus laid, et portait en elle une forme de foi inébranlable en l’art et l’amour. On peut dire sans exagérer qu’elle était du calibre de Marcel Proust. Pas plus tard que cette année, un article de Quill & Quire soulignait que si on devait nommer un autre écrivain canadien pour le Nobel après Alice Munro, il y avait Margaret Atwood et Marie-Claire Blais, ce que rappelait aussi un magnifique portrait d’elle paru en 2019 dans le New Yorker, intitulé Will American Readers Ever Catch on to Marie-Claire Blais ? Écrire en français aux États-Unis, quand on n’est pas Française de France, la plaçait dans une drôle de case pour le Nobel, qui récompense souvent un écrivain et un pays, voilà mon impression.

Marie-Claire sent me the articles concerning her in the United States, as well as photos of her beloved cats, asking me to return photos of my dog to her.

We both communicated to this love of animals;I understood it and she understood me when we were laid to lose them, and that's a bit like that that I have effortlessly pierced the huge shell of its legendary timidity.So much so that every hurricane that hit Key West, I was worried about it, knowing that she couldn't leave her cats in danger.

She was supported by a small circle of tireless admirers, in Paris, Quebec and the United States, very grateful to them, since it was by one of them, Edmund Wilson, whom she obtained in 1963The Guggenheim scholarship which was going to change its destiny and definitively anchor it in American land.

She knew what she had escaped.Born into a worker family in Quebec in 1939, her first novel, the Beautiful Beast, published in 1959 when she was only 20 years old, was rather badly received in the big darkness.We have no idea what it was to be born poor, woman, cheerful and the soul of a writer in Quebec of those years.We really have no idea."A young girl who wrote books, we mistreated her, we did not love her, we did not welcome her well," said Marie-Claire in 2018, recalling that, as Anne Hébert, she too hadpreferred to live elsewhere to write.

It is something that she could not forget, and the most beautiful in this exceptional being is that she did not forget anyone behind her.For 60 years of writing, she put her pen at the service of the underprivileged of the earth, the marginalized and the minorities, not limited to national borders.It was a work of great violence, because it did not ignore the injustices and cruelties of this world, but it naturally stored on those who fight and aspire to live despite everything.Even the executioners were entitled to his gaze imbued with compassion.And the animals that populate his novels were not to be outdone.Such a look is of absolute rarity, I swear.

Marie-Claire Blais ou la mort d’une reine | La Presse

I will forever remember its appearance at dusk at Key West, the first time I visited her magic island, which she shared with another monument of letters, Michel Tremblay. An interview with Marie-Claire Blais did not happen in the morning, it was a nocturnal. She was very frail, but had the look of a rock star, almost the quickdraw of a Keith Richards, with her eternal fringe on smoky eyes, too rowed cheeks and her leather coat. As if she had never left the rebellious and protesting spirit of the 1960s, which she tells very well in her American passages (2012) and inside the threat (2019), which are textbooks courage. At the forefront of progressive struggles, she was convinced that they were permanently changing our societies. Today’s bubbling reminded him of yesterday, as an uninterrupted fight, an inconsistent resistance against conformism. As long as it brews, there is hope, I understood.

What I have retained more important from our discussions for 20 years is how optimistic it was and believed in the evolution of the human being, even if despair can grasp us, and she depicted torments and the dangers of our time. Each time I was galvanized by his confidence, while so many others of his generation think that there is only the flood after them. In 2012, in the midst of a student crisis in Quebec, when she made the young man appear without a future, she recognized in the youth her own anger, and the importance of revolt, for a refreshment of this feverish planet. "These young people are around the world," she said to me. We see them, and they watch us live. Despite everything, I think there is something very positive right now. This is a bit of the start of this start -up. This revolt is very healthy. These are all these movements that we try to translate into books, the return to a kind of joy, of beauty. »»

Marie-Claire Blais thought the same thing the last time we are spoken, in October, for the release of a habité heart of a thousand voices, in which the writer took up the characters of the nights of the underground and theAngel of loneliness, returning to the LGBTQ+struggles.She refused to dwell on decides, she recalled advances, while observing, alert, a rise in homophobia and particular violence against trans people."You cannot be indifferent, you have to denounce this, it is a duty," said the one who remained marked by the AIDS massacre, who has mowed so much from her friends."This is another racism, which has a taboo form.A double racism, because very often, young blacks, Asian or Latinos are killed.»»

Lisez la chronique « Hommage aux luttes LGBTQ+ »

She left me on inspiring words, predicting that the women of this world were not going to let go, and overcome.

My heart tightens, and tears run on their own when I think that a habité heart of a thousand voices was the last book published during his lifetime.And I can't help but find that this title describes it perfectly.She was really that, a heart-haired heart, the voices of the voiceless, as the Boréal editions very rightly pointed out.

I received the news of his death as a shock on Tuesday evening, very late, on vacation in the countryside, while all my books by Marie-Claire Blais, at least thirty, are in Montreal. No importance since his work has lived in me for so long. For a season in Emmanuel's life, which I have read at 16, one of the first Quebec novels that dazzled me. I was definitively marked by the terrible grandmother Antoinette and Jean Le Méné. It was only the beginning - and what a beginning! - Rewarded with the Medici Prize in 1966, to which we often wanted to reduce it, when he opened the way not only to his own vocation, but also to all Quebec writers who were going to follow. Marie-Claire Blais knew even in her flesh what requirements asked for literature-loneliness, precariousness, hard work-, and her life during, she has continued to encourage young feathers who asked her for advice. Without Blais, there would be no Kevin Lambert, Audrée Wilhelmy or Heather O’Neill. It is not for nothing that his brother just as brilliant Réjean Ducharme had dedicated the oceanume to him in 1968, "respectfully, as a princess". She finally became a queen, and I was not ashamed to bow down at her feet.

I could have lost Marie-Claire Blais de Vue if my job had not relaunched to me in her immense romantic cycle threesome, masterpiece of contemporary literature, an unparalleled project that crushes almost everything that has it preceded. Marie-Claire Blais refused to be a dusty classic in a list of compulsory readings at school, and that's good. I would like to recall, once again if you allow me, than in the media fad of primoranckers, less intimidating to read than the writers who have an imposing work, Marie-Claire Blais offered a masterful lesson in literature and proven that Age has nothing to do with relevance, when you are a writer and refuse to sit on his laurels. It was not stimulated by ambition, celebrity or prices, but by an inner fire that can never go out, since it was eating on the embers of what makes you want to live.

Thank you, Marie-Claire, for the whirlwind of the sentences without points that made me walk in Key West and the souls of small ashes, Fleur, Daniel, Mai or Rebecca, and hundreds of others, who made me understandthat we advance together even if you sometimes have the impression of going around in circles in the solitude of your head or your small island.

No one is an island, we are the world.

And I sincerely hope that your friends take care of your orphaned cats.