Celebrated French Canadian novelist dies in Key West
Marie-Claire Blais, a French Canadian author who found wide acclaim with her brutally violent, verbally exuberant novels about suffering, rebellion, intimacy and family, died Nov. 30 in Key West. She was 82.
Her death was announced by the Goodwin Agency, which represented her but did not give a cause. Blais had split her time for many years between Florida and Quebec, where she was considered one of the province’s preeminent authors.
Although she never had a large audience in the United States, she cultivated an ardent readership in the French literary world and was a four-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award, one of Canada’s top honors. French Canadian novelist Michel Tremblay called her “one of our greatest national treasures.”
Writing for the Globe and Mail in 2019, book critic Jade Colbert described Blais as “the 21st century’s Virginia Woolf,” noting the “stylistic innovation and moments of ecstatic clarity” in her recent novels, particularly in a 10-book cycle called
“Soifs” (“Thirstings”) that Blais wrote in an impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness style, without paragraph or chapter breaks. An English translation of the cycle’s ninth installment, “Songs for Angel,” was published in July.
Her novels – she also wrote plays, radio dramas, television scripts and poetry – were filled with abusive priests, wayward nuns, illiterate farmers and delinquent children, and engaged with issues such as white supremacy, AIDS and nuclear war. Animals were tortured, blood was spilled; in her first book, a young woman shoves her brother’s head into a pot of boiling water before burning down their house.
“Personally, I don’t like suffering. I prefer serenity,” the publicity-shy
Blais said in a rare interview with the Walrus, a Canadian magazine. “I am not at all a dark person; in fact, I love it when friends drag me away from writing and out to a bar, although sometimes I write in bars, too. It’s just that so many of my friends seem to have an aptitude for suffering.”
Blais was only 20 when she published her first novel, “La Belle Bête” (1959), a gothic tale of a neglected and resentful girl, her handsome and simple-minded younger brother and their widowed mother. Translated into English as “Mad Shadows,” the book received a French literary prize from the Académie Française in Paris and was adapted for the stage by the National Ballet of Canada.
“The book made me very uneasy,” Canadian author Margaret Atwood later wrote, “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.”
Blais’s admirers also included literary critic Edmund Wilson, who helped her secure a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1963. Two years later, he described her in his book “O Canada” as “a writer in a class by herself,” adding: “At the age of twenty-four, she has produced four remarkable books of a passionate and poetic force that, as far as my reading goes, is not otherwise to be found in French Canadian fiction.”