(LONG-LISTED FOR THE DUBLIN IMPAC AWARD, 2011.)
Media reviews: 
Winning the 2008 Governor General's Literary Award in its original French, it has recently been translated by Nigel Spencer, who has won two GGs himself for translating other Blais novels. 
Blais is a legend in Quebec letters with 25 published works of fiction, almost all critically acclaimed.
This translation feels right, from beginning to end...the rhythm essential in the French is present in the English version as well.
One way to approach the novel is to read it aloud, possibly to your partner at bedtime...it sounds fantastic and is loaded with sensual and visceral images.
It is jazz, but not smooth jazz. Sometimes it is bebop, sometimes Latin. 
There is pleasure in the rhythm and poetry of the language. 
If you can let go, the sense will come to you.
–Victor Enns, Winnipeg Free Press—Nov. 28, 2009.

There is pleasure in the rhythm and poetry of the language...this novel keeps company with James Joyce's Ulysses and Virginia Woolf's The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway.
— WINNIPEG FREE PRESS

...the experience is the only goal; the journey, the reward...a coherent vision of the world. ---MONTREAL GAZETTE

...brimming with tenderness for humanity and an almost religious elevation...
—GLOBE AND MAIL

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....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. —WALRUS

“Let it wash over you,” the man says. “Like body surfing, let the waves take you. Don’t try to touch bottom, and you won’t hit the rocks.”
 A burly guy with a voice like timber, Nigel Spencer is sitting at my kitchen table, talking into my tape recorder, addressing my despair.
--Marianne Ackerman, "How to Read a Masterpiece:
Coming to Terms With Marie-Claire Blais" in The Walrus, Sept. 2009.

The precarious sweetness of living:
Lionized at home and abroad over a 50-year career, the Québécoise writer Marie-Claire Blais remains more of a rumour than a legend. She is read mainly by writers, perhaps because - more than 75 years after the publication of Virginia Woolf's The Waves - readers have difficulty with her omission of paragraph breaks and the fact that she uses multiple voices.
Yet, like interwoven diary entries written by distinct individuals, Blais's prose is clear to an attentive reader. It is also meaningful in the way only work written with a high aim and a profound understanding of human motivation can be.
Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom, the fourth novel in an acclaimed series, addresses the issue of human suffering. It is populated by characters of all classes, races and world views, whose thoughts we follow as they confront pain both concrete and abstract.
There is Ari, an artist travelling in Guatemala with his monk friend; he is anguished over the misery he sees, the tension between art and religion, and his growing distance from his young daughter, whose mother will not live with him.
There is the music-loving Mère, matriarch of a family of intellectuals and artists, distressed by the nihilism of her grandchildren. There is Augustino, Mère's grandson, who at 20 has just published the incinerating Letter to the Young with No Future. There is the beautiful Vénus, scarred by racism, raped as a child and again as an adult, yet fiercely hopeful for her child ("you just wait and see where she goes my girl Rebecca …").
Finally, there is Rebecca, a little girl with ribbons in her hair.
The worst crimes of history and contemporary abuses work their way into the characters' reflections as they go about their lives. In a mere 200 pages, Blais viscerally depicts "the indecency in which nearly all live," experiences as disparate as the grief of American mothers who have lost children in Iraq and the desperation of child labourers in India.
Rebecca is the gift of a 70-year-old writer

Ari, on his Guatemalan bus trip, recalls a little girl, whom he guesses is sexually abused, "begging from passersby, puppy-like … take me home with you she said, please take me home, I have no mummy or daddy, imploring words that cut miserably through the night and the city and Ari's heart, how was this possible, and how could he not save her."
Blais seamlessly fuses the socio-political with the personal: Reading a long-desired message from his wife and daughter, Ari wonders "what had he done for them to write with so much coldness … he suddenly felt his little girl was no more."
Blais's characters find temporary relief. The pregnant and abandoned Angelina, travelling on the same bus as Ari, is cheered by the radiant Tigli, a man so ravaged by AIDS that Ari is initially repelled by his presence. Mère's troubled granddaughter Mai, less loved if more privileged than Rebecca, is filled with affection for her distant father after a frightening encounter with drifters.
Mère herself takes refuge in thoughts of her family's upcoming Christmas feast. Amid this back-and-forth, Blais provides no glib compensations, no facile solutions - only, it seems, movement. Her writing sometimes gives one the sensation of bobbing up and down in a boat without oars. The motion carrying us to our destination is almost imperceptible.
It is a little like great music. Toward the close, Mère recollects a letter from Augustino which is a long crescendo of generational despair, "soon there will be no more polar bears left to drown, fifteen million species vanished, swallowed up in the deluge, rivers with no beds or directions, massacred by us, Earth, oh Earth will lay its disappearance on your shoulders … only a world of water or murderous drought with cracked deserts of malnourished little children dying one by one at the drooping breasts of their mothers."
Blais's final "movement," after this, is a stroke of genius. Though the reader is aware that an act of devastating brutality is about to occur, Blais composes a passage, including Mère's joy-filled Christmas feast and a flash of Vènus and Rebecca on their way to a parade, which fills one with serenity. Vénus says to her child born of rape, "hold my hand, I don't want to lose you in this crowd …" Like the dying Tigli, who delivers Angelina's child, Rebecca in her wonder is the symbol of life's infinite regeneration.
Rebecca is the gift of a 70-year-old writer who once, in her debut novel, La Belle Bête, offered a vision as bleak as that of her character Augustino. Though brimming with tenderness for humanity and an almost religious elevation, Rebecca is deeply realistic. The redemption presented promises nothing but the "precarious sweetness of living." We believe in it because it does not lie to us.
--Aparna Sanyal (Associate Editor of the Montreal Review of Books) The Globe and Mail, Friday, Nov. 27 2009.
 
(This review was originally published in the Gazette on Saturday, July 28, 2007.)
To understand the nuances of Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, the latest novel by Quebec literary icon Marie-Claire Blais, it helps to be familiar with the works of composer Benjamin Britten, specifically his Requiem. Frequently mentioned in the text, this bleak piece of music based on the First World War poetry of Wilfred Owen and meant to underline the futility of war was a key inspiration for the work, says Blais.
But chances are, unless you are a literary scholar who routinely imbibes James Joyce for breakfast, you may still find yourself floundering in the unstoppable torrent of words Blais has unleashed in this book, the third of a four-part series.
There is no central character (Augustino, a boy author gifted with insight, is more of a witness than a protagonist), no easily discernible plot, no chapter breaks, scant punctuation. Initially, the reader feels adrift on the open seas. Once rigorous attention is applied, however, there's a growing sensation of being inexorably swept away - into a fragmented world where children are tuned into doomsday prophecies. The book, originally published as Augustino et le choeur de la destruction, and deftly translated into English by Nigel Spencer, is not a cheery read.
While reading this poetic post-9/11 novel set in Florida, the word apocalyptic springs to mind. Blais does not object to the term.
"It is what we go through, now," she said, as we began our interview in a restaurant chosen for the purpose because of its proximity to Blais's current Quebec pied-à-terre, in Westmount. "We have the voices of destruction that we hear every day," she said, choosing to speak English, rather than French. "And sometimes we have someone like Augustino who is trying to have a future. And he's feeling like many, many young people around him. Trying to be positive about something that is difficult."
None of the characters who float by the reader like flotsam on the flood have it easy. Not Petites Cendres, the transvestite who works as a low-rent hooker and is always getting knocked around. Not Caroline, a once-famous photographer who has slipped into dementia. Nor Mai, the little girl who is in danger of being abducted.
Only one, however, is a nihilist with homicidal fantasies. By Page 4, in this intense incantation, we are subjected to the internal rantings of a would-be terrorist, a young Muslim named Lazaro who hates his stepfather and sees glory in self-destruction: "The sullen, strong-willed, dry and thirsty planet would be reserved for the young and angry, those destined to sensitive missions of martyrdom, thousands of them, unnamed and unnameable, candidates for suicide, flourishing in disordered ranks worldwide, staging attacks anywhere and everywhere."
The first book of the series, Soifs (1995), was published in English as These Festive Nights. It was followed by Dans la foudre et la lumière in 2001, translated as Thunder and Light. When Augustino et le choeur de la destruction was released in French two years ago, it was billed as the final book in a trilogy. Then Blais decided to keep going. Book Four remains a work-in-progress.
"It's a big project," Blais said, referring to all four books. "What you need to do is be very, very focused. And at the same time, very mobile, because there's movement - our times are very, very fast. This mobility, we love it. But sometimes it's very hard on us. Because we lose a lot of things. We lose friends. We lose people that we see dying on TV. We see everything and it's very, very fast and we don't have time to focus on it very much. This kind of book is about that, how to see these things. They are in very rapid movement in the book. It's the acceleration of our lives."
Blais, one of the pioneers of Quebec's current legions of globe-trotting artists, was scheduled to fly to Key West, Fla., the day after we spoke. "I really love it," she said of her adopted home. "In summer there, it's very quiet. There aren't very many tourists." Her Key West apartment is located close to the refuge of another Quebec icon, playwright-novelist Michel Tremblay.
"But he's not there right now," she added. "He's in France." Blais has been in Florida, on and off, since the end of the '70s. Her apartment is 15 minutes from the sea by bicycle. "I went for a reading," she explained. "I began to go for a few months a year. Then I began to go much more. I really love it. I have friends there. It was a hideaway. In those days, it cost nothing. You could even be in a hotel for a long time."
Born into a less than affluent family in Quebec City in 1939, Blais began writing while she was very young - in spite of having to drop out of school to earn a living. Her first novel, La Belle Bête (Mad Shadows), was published when she was only 20. Since then, she has authored more than 25 books, including poetry and plays as well as novels. Three of her books have been adapted into film, notably Une saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel.
Blais has never quite fit the Quebec mould. She gained international renown before strong local recognition kicked in. American literary critic Edmund Wilson paved her way to receiving two generous Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1963 and 1965. France awarded her the Prix France-Canada in 1965 and the Prix Médicis in 1966. Canada has recognized her with three Governor General's Awards, in 1968, 1979 and 1996. And in 1972, she became a Companion of the Order of Canada. It wasn't until 1982 that she took the Prix Athanase-David lifetime achievement award in Quebec. She was inducted into the Académie des lettres du Québec in 1994.
"I have always been a bit of a loner," Blais said. But one with a keen sense of social justice: "People should be respected for what they are, whatever they are." Most of her adult life has been spent outside the country. Her most enduring life partnership was with American artist-author Mary Meigs, who died in 2002. Blais still feels this loss deeply. "People grow less when they're alone," she said. Now her household includes four Siamese cats. The two older ones travel with her, the younger two remain at home in Florida. Her sense of family, however, also extends to the network of friends, from all cultural backgrounds, who have inspired this series of novels. "These people do exist," she said. On the page, however, they take on surreal dimensions, the fragments of their lives woven together through Blais's dark, magical prose.
--Globe and Mail