All life’s lost souls
Marie-Claire Blais’s latest book, The Acacia Gardens, is chock-a-block with writers. One of them, a widower named Adrien, is in the midst of crafting a poem titled “Giving Account.” And so it strikes me that this is perhaps the septuagenarian Blais’s summation of her own dyspeptic take on the world and its spiritual follies.
At one point, Adrien opines, “If anyone still reads me it’s because my thinking is primarily theoretical.” Doubtless influenced by modernist writing, Blais’s stream of consciousness narrative style is replete with sentences that go on for pages with periods as rare as hens’ teeth. Numerous storylines butt into one another. With the novel’s enormous cast of characters, I was at my wit’s end trying to divine what was going on and why.
Not to say the book isn’t exquisitely written. If you get into the groove of Blais’s unique mindset, there’s a motherlode of insights into the human condition.
Acacia Gardens is a residential complex in The South, a holding pen for an assortment of life’s lost souls. Among them, a guy called the Old Sophisticate who’s keen to leave his wife and move into the Gardens after being outed for being naughty with the drag queens at the Porte du Baiser Saloon.
Much of the saloon’s talent repose at the Gardens, and some are sickly from a mysterious illness. But mostly this crew of social rejects is looking for love. Most don’t achieve it. At one point, a young writer reflects on the love between the two dead poets in whose house he lives. “They had an ideal relationship, absolute, nothing I will ever have with a man, I know that, and yet, it’s what I crave most in life, more than the success of my books.”
Perhaps the most fascinating character is a priest called Wrath — as in the Wrath of God — who’s on the run for child molestation. Much of the book’s psychological fury is captured in exchanges between him and his nemesis, The Old Woman. Defending himself from her attacks, Wrath rants, “I am a man debauched and dissolute, one whipped on by a passion for virtue.” Such moral complexities and the grandiosity of Blaise’s language give this book its appeal — despite its narrative rigours. Robert Collison is a Toronto writer and editor.