Marie-Claire Blais’s Soifs cycle might be set on a tropical island, but a ‘beach read’ it is not.Andre Pichette/The Globe and Mail
Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Balzac, Stein, Beckett – when you think “avant-garde writer,” those are the names that spring to most minds. All are audacious in their own way, but few match the combination of formal daring with the sweeping, world-creating scope of Marie-Claire Blais’s 10-book Soifs cycle.
The recent publication of the final volume, Together by the Sea, means that the entire, nearly 3,000-page project is now available to English readers. (Soifs, the French title of the first book, was published in English as These Festive Nights, presumably to avoid the clunky direct translation of “thirsts”).
Written between 1995 and 2018, each novel is written in paragraph-free stream-of-consciousness prose consisting of long-running sentences (the longest stretching to about 150 pages) broken up mainly by commas. Reading Blais can put you in a flow state, so when a rare period does come along, it can feel like someone suddenly slammed on the brakes.
From the archives: Learning to read Marie-Claire Blais
When she embarked on the decalogy (originally planned as a trilogy), Blais, who died in 2021, was already an established author of admired but more conventional novels. Her most famous, A Season in the Life of Emmanuel, from 1965, was the first, and remains one of only three Canadian books to win France’s prestigious Prix Médicis. (The most recent is Que notre joie demeure by millennial author Kev Lambert, whose oft-professed admiration of Blais is signalled in the book’s title, which tweaks the title of a song that recurs throughout the Soifs books). Some considered her the next most likely Canadian to win the Nobel Prize (after Alice Munro).
Instead of seeking refinement in her “late style,” Blais instead got looser, stranger, more experimental, without going into full linguistic meltdown, like Joyce in Finnegan’s Wake.
The Soifs cycle, plotless in the traditional sense, is driven by a vast, polyphonic “choir” of characters who hearken from a wide spectrum of society: judges, strivers, orphans, drug addicts, the AIDS-afflicted (Blais, who was gay, was a pioneer in writing about LGBTQ realities). A few recurring characters – a writer named Daniel, a child, Augustino and the fragile Mélanie – help lend the novels continuity.
Blais’s use of what critics have termed her “radical empathy” means that even the most reprehensible characters, like the white supremacist who commits a massacre at a Black church in Songs for Angel, are treated as human rather than monstrous.
Though primarily set on a small American island in the Caribbean strongly reminiscent of Key West, where Blais lived for the last few decades of her life, the Soifs books also have a global outlook, exploring events from the aftermath of Chernobyl to the Gulf War to the war in Ukraine.
I asked Chantal Guy, a journalist with La Presse who wrote many articles about Blais over the years, what, in her estimation, makes Blais’s writing so extraordinary. “She had an immense awareness of the world, down to its smallest details,” Guy wrote in an e-mail, “and she championed its beauty, fragility, friendship, and difference, but without any naiveté. I loved her.”
And yet as much as the Soifs books – and Blais – are treated reverentially in Quebec (the term “masterpiece” is often bandied about), they have also suffered the fate of a lot of “difficult” literature; namely, that more people talk about them than read them.
(Interviewing a prominent contemporary author via Zoom recently, I noticed that we both owned the same distinctive six-volume Modern Library edition of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and that each volume was progressively less worn. Our Volume Sixes were virtually pristine.)
The reasons aren’t hard to fathom. Experimental novels ask readers to hold multiple ideas in their heads, grapple with ambiguous language, navigate alternative forms of storytelling and be okay, sometimes, with not fully understanding what they’re reading. Most importantly, they require sustained attention – a commodity more precious than gold in this BookTok era. If you didn’t tackle Ulysses or The Waves in university, then there’s a good chance you never will. The Soifs cycle might be set on a tropical island, but a “beach read” it is not.
Michel Biron, a French literature professor at McGill who has taught Blais’s work, sees her as the only major Quebec writer from the Quiet Revolution era to have remained stalwartly contemporary. He detects in her books a distinct ethical shift that emerged in post-2000 Quebec literature – a shift that, in his words, “transcended the old national horizon in favour of a cosmopolitan universe imbued with lucidity and compassion.”
Not everyone is as besotted. Reviewing the cycle’s eighth book, A Twilight Celebration, in Le Devoir, critic Christian Desmeules complained that the books were “beginning to take on the air of logorrhea. So much so that one could almost copy and paste a previous review – adding a touch of weariness – to describe this new whirlwind of voices […] carried by a cold and somewhat stroboscopic narrative.”
As far as literary diseases go, logorrhea isn’t the worst. And the truth is, once you settle into their non-narrative style – where characters’ voices constantly overlap and merge – the Soifs books are surprisingly easy to follow. (The hardest part is finding your place in the paragraph-less text after an interruption.) And if you’re new to Blais, you’ve got an advantage: the latest book has a handy guide to all 250 or so “main” characters at the back.
Marie-Claire Blais, celebrated novelist and playwright, dies at 82
Though Blais is less known in English-speaking Canada, she still has a committed fan base that eagerly awaits the appearance of each book, according to Karen Brochu, publisher at House of Anansi, which has published the Soifs cycle under its French-Canada-focused Arachnide imprint.
Few are likely as devoted as Pierre‑Éric Villeneuve, a retired professor from the Quebec City region who turned the Soifs books into a kind of lifelong mission. Villeneuve would prepare for the release of each new title by rereading the previous volumes so as to better let the series unfold as a single, unbroken sentence.
Though largely reclusive, Villeneuve emerged the year after Blais’s death to read all 12 Soifs books (some consider two later novels part of the cycle) over 17 days at a Quebec City cultural centre. Villeneuve, it was noted at the time, is not on social media and does not own a cellphone.
In 2019, Canadian author Pasha Malla wrote an excellent piece for The New Yorker entitled “Will American Readers Ever Catch on to Marie-Claire Blais?” A fair question, given how long Blais lived in the U.S., though I’m not sure its implication – that Canadians, especially anglophones, have caught on – is correct.
So why read the Soifs books? For the same reasons most people won’t: to try holding multiple ideas in your head, grapple with ambiguous language, navigate alternative forms of storytelling and be okay, sometimes, with not fully understanding what you’re reading.