The Day Is Dark and Three Travellers

Denyse Guilbeault-Chong was General Librarian at Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario.

Born in 1939 in Quebec City, Marie-Claire Blais wanted to become a writer like the well-known Gabrielle Roy and Anne Hébert. At twenty, Blais published her first novel La belle bête (1959), translated afterwards as Mad Shadows (1960), and thereafter she won several awards.

The book under review actually contains two of Blais’s works: The Day Is Dark, a translation of her novella Le jour est noir originally published in 1962, and Three Travellers, also originally published in French in 1962 in Ecrits du Canada français under the title Les voyageurs sacrés. A common theme prevails in both stories: suffering.

The Day Is Dark, written during her stay in Paris, introduces, in a dreamlike world, the element of death as it affects a family of young people. This mortal adventure is well brought out by use of contrast: darkness to daylight, life to death, love to betrayal, and hope to despair. Blais is very conscious of the profound psychological sufferings that are often present in the young. The transition from adolescence to adulthood seems impossible for them.

Three Travellers is primarily a love story. In it, Blais manages to depict love in a very unusual way. The story takes place in the thoughts of the main character, who is listening to a concerto. It encompasses the past, present, and future. The author enters the “inner world of a playwright and his sculptress wife who are both enchanted by a brilliant pianist.” Blais has great success in shifting from prose to poetry and vice versa, which enables “une telle fusion art et vie, matière et esprit” (Dict. des oeuvres litt. du Québec IV, 1984).

Marie-Claire Blais has also published poems, plays, and essays and many of her works have been translated into several languages. The book under review includes an introduction by Janet M. Paterson, a professor at Erindale College, University of Toronto. The two novellas, previously published in English in 1967, were translated by Derek Coltman. However, there is no mention of the translator’s name in this edition.