Known internationally as an award-winning QuZbecois novelist, Marie-Claire Blais has remained hidden as a dramatist from Anglophone readers. Nigel Spencer's first-ever translation recreates Blais' disturbing yet lyrical dramas, evoking a world of "winter sleep," while in the new millennium people prepare to put on new costumes, take on new roles.
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Known internationally as an award-winning QuZbecois novelist, Marie-Claire Blais has remained hidden as a dramatist from Anglophone readers. Nigel Spencer's first-ever translation recreates Blais' disturbing yet lyrical dramas, evoking a world of "winter sleep," while in the new millennium people prepare to put on new costumes, take on new roles.
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Add this copy of Wintersleep: Five Chamber Plays to cart. $18.00, very good condition, Sold by Hourglass Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Vancouver, BC, CANADA, published 1998 by Ronsdale Press.
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Seller's Description:
Very Good. No Jacket as Issued. Book Inscribed by Marie-Claire Blais on the title page; some edge wear to card covers; otherwise a solid, clean copy with no marking or underlining; collectible condition.
Add this copy of Wintersleep to cart. $19.34, very good condition, Sold by Prominent Trading Company rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Hereford, HEREFORDSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 1998 by Ronsdale Press.
Add this copy of Wintersleep to cart. $25.32, like new condition, Sold by Marches Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Hereford, HEREFORDSHIRE, UNITED KINGDOM, published 1998 by Ronsdale Press.
In an excellent introduction, Nigel Spencer, the translator, contextualizes these lyrical, elliptical works...all five plays feature female voices asserting themselves in painful dialogue with male partners. Oscillating between intimate personal detail and philosophical abstraction, between tentativeness and aggression, each play probes a different sensibility, a different tension.
. . .
The dialogue is rendered even more poignant by the accompanying musicality of Blais' long poetic lines.
. . .
Perhaps the most evocative of all is the study in contrasts, "FEVER"--a beautifully orchestrated dialogue between a wife and a husband in which she unveils his hypocrisy and her complicity against the exoticized backdrop of Morocco.
Reading these enigmatic musings set amidst highly visualized backgrounds or sets, one participates in the equivocal, tenuous relations between men and women, speech and silence, oppression and freedom. As Blais, through the voice of her translator, so eloquently puts it: "But here I am, and he listens. It is late. At least, he seems to listen."
--Cathy Mezei, BOOKS IN CANADA, SUMMER 1999.
