At the end, she writes her phone number in my notebook and insists on paying for the drinks, the first time in my experience as a journalist this has happened. She is, as those who admire her say, generous, friendly, easy to like, and at the same time utterly mysterious, obviously composed. A cheerful emissary for all she has written. I could imagine her cutting loose in a karaoke bar, Robert Charlebois or Lynda Lemay. Yet there is something of the nun in her demeanour, a body filled with otherworldly thoughts.
“Marie-Claire writes from her own need,” says Michel Tremblay. “She writes for herself.” Poet and translator Émile Martel, president of pen Quebec, says it’s true not many people read her, “but they buy her books. That’s half the battle,” he quips. An army of academics and critics has effectively canonized Blais in her lifetime: some eighty theses written on her work, plus a thick bibliography of books and articles; honours, prizes, literary jury duty, frequent appearances and readings. A cult, says Martel. For three consecutive years, PEN Quebec voted to put her name forward when the Swedish committee came asking for their advice on Nobel candidates.
My eighth grade teacher gave our class a brief and highly effective course in speed reading, a series of techniques, how to skim a page, hang on to the beginnings and endings of paragraphs, scan for key phrases, and squeeze meaning out of prose without having to mouth each successive word. This skill proved extremely useful around exam time. Its value has endured into researching magazine articles and reading books for review, but proved a huge liability in the face of the extraordinary literary achievement that is Soifs and the two connected volumes leading to Rébecca, Born in the Maelstrom.
There is only one way to read the latter novels of Marie-Claire Blais. Slowly. One word, one phrase at a time, and then the next. Preferably in a quiet place where there is no phone and no deadline. Ideally, in two or three long stretches, when you can fall asleep and then begin again in the morning, until the absence of punctuation finally becomes an absence of noise. The ends of disconnected threads begin to reappear. Familiar names pop up, voices, like conversations overheard on a journey. Once it all starts to make sense, you feel utterly grateful and deeply connected, in tune with humanity, mesmerized, ready to go on and on. These are truly books of our time, if, maddeningly, perhaps sadly, not for our time.
