These Festive Nights

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French Studies at the University
of Guelph. She is the author of Courts métrages et instantanés and La
Soupe.

Marie-Claire Blais is the author of 30 books, many of which have won
literary prizes. Published in 1995 under the title Soifs, These Festive
Nights earned Blais the Governor General’s Award. The novel is written
as one continuous paragraph, a structure that has been respected by
Blais’s highly competent translator, Sheila Fischman. Speaking in a
fluid narrative voice, Blais reveals a sombre vision of life—the
omnipresence of war and violence, the difficult lives of women, the
ambiguities of relationships (including lesbian relationships), poverty,
AIDS, delinquency, and addiction. A feminist intellectual, she asserts
the crucial importance of art in a world that is hostile toward the
artist and distrusts writers. These Festive Nights focuses on our thirst
for justice and pleasure, for spirituality in our lives of hardship.
Situated in the paradise of a tropical island, it depicts humanity as a
community of sufferers.