Anna's World

Carolyn Hlus was a lecturer in English literature at the University of Alberta, Edmonton.

Marie-Claire Blais’s fifteenth novel, Anna’s World, ranks indisputably alongside her previous award-winning novels: A Season in the Life of Emmanuel (Prix Médicis and Prix France-Québec, 1966), The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange and Deaf to the City (Governor General’s Awards for Fiction, 1967 and 1980, respectively). But before these, when only 20 years old, Blais identified herself as a force to be reckoned with when her first novel, Mad Shadows, startled Canadian literary circles with its bizarre surrealism and frightening portrayal of a society suspiciously Québécois. Established since as a poet, playwright, and essayist, Blais again proves in her latest novel that she possesses an unquestionably unique flexibility of style. Her subject matter again reflects an acute awareness of the current social climate. Characters in Anna’s “world” balance precariously at the frontier of death.

Immediately prominent is the unusual style of Anna’s World. The book is one long discourse with only three unnamed chapters, and only sparse breaks, apparently paragraph breaks, within these three chapters. Sentences are exceedingly bong, sometimes a whole page, and are broken only by commas with the effect that qualifiers layer upon qualifiers. This violation of traditional form, and the omniscient narrator’s propensity to transcend time and space, to move through one consciousness to another, in short passages of written text — indeed, like a journey on an expanded drug-trip — create an effect of intense urgency.

Set in the face of imminent nuclear disaster, Anna’s World defines the lives of adolescents caught in the intrigue of sex and mind-boggling drugs. Characters develop primarily by chance interactions with other characters. Central to the novel are two families: Anna’s and Michelle’s. Anna’s mother, Raymonde, works in a girls’ correctional institution. Her best friend is Michelle’s mother, a doctor named Guislaine whom, in turn, Anna takes as a surrogate mother. Both Anna and Michelle have been ravaged by the social ills of their time: Anna has wandered aimlessly through the Caribbean drug-culture with her dealer and lover, merely surviving on the fringe and engaging in a loose lifestyle that includes prostitution. Michelle, who has a passion for Wagner, is possessed by anorexia brought on by drugs and is “dying under her mother’s eyes.” Liliane, Michelle’s sister, is a Lesbian of whom it is said, “even in the enamel of her teeth you could sense that will to seduce.” Relationships become increasingly difficult to decipher as the dregs of society, nerve endings exposed and shredded by the ordeals of reality, mingle with the bewildered intellectuals.

Anna’s World is dressed in a style consistently expressive of contemporary anger and confusion. It tells a profoundly human tale about a lost generation striving to find peace in the midst of catastrophic disorder.