Novel
A Season in the Life of Emmanuel
Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel
Marie-Claire Blais · 1965
Synopsis
A poor farm in Quebec, in winter. Emmanuel, the sixteenth child, has just been born, and it is his grandmother Antoinette who rules the household. Around him the older children grow up: Jean Le Maigre, a tubercular teenager who writes and who is sent to the novitiate with the Brothers; the Septième, his brother and accomplice, a thief, who sets fire to the school; Pomme; Héloïse, a tormented mystic out of the convent, who is promised a place in an inn. The father is harsh; the mother, worn out by her pregnancies, goes back to the fields.
Context
The novel appeared in Montreal, with Éditions du Jour, in 1965, then in Paris with Grasset the following year; its author, barely past twenty-five, had written it in the United States, where the grant obtained thanks to Wilson had settled her. It appeared in English in 1966, in Derek Coltman's translation, with a preface by the critic. Its reception in Quebec was at first mixed, and it was in Paris that the book was crowned.
Who it is for
A short novel, in a prose that passes without warning from one consciousness to another; the darkness is constant and comedy surfaces.
Prizes and reception
Prix Médicis and Prix France-Québec in 1966; translated into more than a dozen languages.
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