Mariaagelas: Maria, Daughter of Gelas

Gail L. Cox was Librarian, Audio Visual Services, Metro Toronto Reference Library.

Maillet, prize-winning, celebrated author of over twenty novels, plays, and short stories, including La Sagouine, has created another memorable heroine.

Mariaagélas, who is a feisty, spirited, majestically indomitable young Acadian, has discovered, during the prohibition of the thirties, that nowhere isthere greater opportunity than along the Atlantic coast. Thus, she maneuvers herself into the centre of coastal smuggling action.

Maillet has created a coastal village replete with individuals, each of whom is developed with compassionate, humourous splendor. The narration is defined by the rhythm of Acadian cadences. With ironic insight, wit and understatement, the comic seesaw of the battle between the ingenious Mariaagébas and that tireless meddler, the widow Calixte, develops to a dramatic climax.

Overshadowing the village dramas are the seemingly mindless laws of the federal government. This ignorant voice of the faraway law-making “big shots” provides another challenge to village ingenuity and inadvertently contributes to the novel’s true tragedy.