The Exile and the Sacred Travellers

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.

This powerful collection consists of one novella and nine short stories
that offer an overview of Marie-Claire Blais’s short fiction from 1962
to 1989. The opening pieces, “The New School Mistress” and “An Act
Of Pity,” reveal the author’s major concerns. The curé of Vallée
d’Or (the valley of gold) must control his anger at “the idea that
God could create such a beautiful landscape, such a promise of serenity
and joy ... to have it yield only destitution and decay.” These and
subsequent stories bring into sharp focus Blais’s preoccupation with
poverty and degradation, with suffering “doled out unfairly,” with
racism, organized religion, injustice, and death. For the female
protagonist in “Revolutionary and Friend,” death is “nothing ...
It’s like changing clothes, that’s all.” But she belongs to the
privileged, those who have some distance from the disenfranchised for
whom she fought as a civil activist. A very short story,
“Dispossession,” summarizes in haunting words the fate of
dispossessed man, a “cursed, despicable thing of battered flesh” to
whom no one will come.

Blais situates her stories in beautiful spaces where “carefree young
girls” dance without knowing that crimes just go on “covering the
earth in ashes,” or that an “invisible executioner” deals his
blows. There are earthly paradises and islands full of sunshine, but the
light that seems to illuminate them also shows “every degrading and
pathetic detail” and the author sees in magnificent sunsets “a thin
trail of blood.”

The back cover cites John Hollander as saying that “Marie-Claire
Blais must be one of the most profoundly intelligent and gifted
novelists in North America.” He is right.