Martine Desjardins – författare

Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth-century Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie violates the sanctity of the confessional in a confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afficted with a debilitating malady or struck with a crippling deformity, relates his encounter with an enigmatic young woman whose lips bear a striking scar.As these men penetrate deep into the exotic Orient, each falls victim to his own secret vice. One treks through Ethiopia in search of wingless locusts. Another hunts for fly-whisks among the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Yet others bargain for saffron in a Srinagar bazaar, search for the rarest frankincense, and pursue the coveted hawksbill turtle in the Sea of Oman. Two more seek the formula for sabon Nablus in Palestine or haggle over Persian carpets in the royal gardens of Shiraz. The men’s individual forms of punishment, revealed through the agency of the young woman, are wrought upon their bodies.

In 1914, Simon Dulac enrolls in a Canadian contingent of military police, a perfect cover for his real ambition—to comb the battlefields of Europe unhindered in his search for the legendary Templar treasure said to have been buried in Flanders in 1307. An inveterate and uncannily lucky gambler, Dulac encounters Nell, who has come to the trenches to practice suturing wounds, forbidden to nurses in her native England.So skilled is Nell at her craft that she knits together torn and broken flesh with elaborate and beautiful embroidery, creating a rebus code which both reveals and conceals the most intricate secrets of her charges.Haunted by the iron jealousy of their commanding officer, Dulac and Nell pursue their desires and risk everything in the greatest game of all.Masterful, transgressive and erudite, Desjardins’s second novel constructs a narrative tapestry woven of the most elusive threads of meaning and signification.

Set between 1913 and 1963 in one of Montreal’s well-known, upper-middle-class suburban neighbourhoods, Martine Desjardins’s The Green Chamber is a fast-paced, highly atmospheric, riveting novel that chronicles the decline of a wealthy French-Canadian family over the course of three generations.Every house has its secrets, but none hides them better than the august house of the Delorme family. With its sixty-seven locks, brass-grilled counters, and impenetrable underground vault – where lie the mummified remains of a woman clutching a brick between her teeth – the Delorme residence may be apprehended as The Green Chamber’s central persona. A private bank of a sort, it has always held its lot of ill-acquired gains, hidden vices, cruel rituals, and illicit substances away from prying eyes. Louis-Dollard Delorme, his miserly wife Estelle, and his three spinster sisters revere money so much that they have converted their residence’s “Green Chamber” into a place of worship and have elevated domestic penny-pinching to an art form. As for the family’s heir, Vincent, they intend for him to make a highly profitable marriage – a reasonable prospect, until the day when the house opens its door to Penny Sterling, a young woman whose means equal only her curiosity.Desjardins’s humorous gothic saga – with its gallery of eccentric characters who play the races in secret and sniff vanilla extract – reveals and revels in the fate of family fortunes, where the first generation makes the money, the second generation maintains it, and the third blows it.The novel’s plot and themes arise, larger than life, from the history of the author’s own family, and from that of her suburban hometown, Mount Royal, whose founding is closely linked to the development of Canada’s national railroad and early industry. The Green Chamber exposes the birth of capitalistic religiosity and sheds light on our economic present: personal finances, once based on a nest-egg savings system, have become a credit-based and debt-ridden travesty.

När Medusa förskjuts av sin familj och spärras in på Athenæum, ett isolerat institut för unga kvinnor med kroppsliga defekter, har hon dittills aldrig vågat se sig i spegeln. Hela sitt liv har hon gått med håret för ansiktet och blicken i golvet eftersom hennes fruktade ögon måste döljas.

Innanför institutets murar pågår grymma ritualer och förnedrande lekar, iscensatta av män med makt. De unga kvinnorna formas genom lydnad och skam, och de som inte överlever sänks i sjön som är full av självlysande maneter. Men ett gryende motstånd anas och Medusa bär på krafter som hotar hela ordningen. Medusa är ett mörkt, suggestivt läsäventyr där myten får nytt liv. Det är en laddad gotisk saga om makt, begär och motstånd, lika obehaglig som oemotståndlig.  ”Ett under av gotisk skräck.”Le Monde”Romanen sjuder av fantasi och fångar oss i ett berättargrepp som är omöjligt att ta sig ur. Och ännu bättre: man vill bara ha mer.”Journal de Montréal

Martine Desjardins, född 1957 i Mont-Royal, Québec, är författare och litteraturvetare. Hennes romaner har nominerats och belönats med flera av Kanadas och Québecs främsta litteraturpriser.