Soifs Cycle – serie

The tenth and final instalment of the legendary Soifs cycleFor her eighteenth birthday, Mai hosts a party on the unnamed island where her family lives, on the edge of the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico. The celebrants include Daniel, Mai's father and a writer; the children of Bahama Street who sing in Pastor Jeremy’s church; the wealthy artists and famous poets; the refugees and ex-cons; the trans performers of the Porte du Baiser Saloon. From this core, vast circles emerge, examining in one breath the horrors of fascist regimes and the beauty of queer nightlife, embracing the America of mass shooters and the struggles for civil rights, and laying bare the tragedies that shook the 20th century and laid the foundation for the years to come.Poetic and meditative, with language that rolls and crashes like the ocean itself, Together by the Sea sings with the complexity of all beings, good and evil, past and present, here and elsewhere, connecting us all in the same unique, pitiful, and grandiose humanity.

What anxiety grips Petites Cendres as he runs towards the sea in the sunshine on a warm tropical morning? Shouldn’t he be reassured by the thought that he now lives at the Acacia Gardens, a comfortable home where all find care, understanding, and healing? How can Fleur, the young musical prodigy, listen to the diabolical confessions of Wrath, the fugitive priest, without shuddering? And, can Daniel the writer finish his novel, the one he has been working on for twenty years, despite his sensitivity and empathy for all creatures, even if they are the most humble, like the lizard he inadvertently crushed under his sandal?With this latest novel, Marie-Claire Blais once again gives us a vibrant portrait that embraces the span of life — from birth to death and beyond. Her characters question their purpose and what will come after, as they are confronted by evil that lives and that has taken root.

The latest work in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire Blais’s masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration examines the prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world whose fate is yet to be determined.Daniel, a middle-aged novelist and loving father alienated from one of his sons and unsure how to care for his daughter, is on his way to an international conference of writers. The gathering is to be held in the forest above a mountain village of a strangely dreamlike nature. In the twilight of the festival’s setting, dreams, memories, nightmares, and dark forebodings meld in Daniel’s unsettled but deeply sympathetic consciousness: He is haunted by pressing existential questions: What is to be done? What are his responsibilities as a father, as a friend — and as a writer? As Daniel confronts his own vanities, as he recalls the activism but also the disappointments and betrayals of friends and colleagues — as he contends with, above all, the fears and aspirations of his children in times marred by apocalypse, he asks, ultimately, what can be done?In what may well be the most beautiful and disturbing of her novels, Marie-Claire Blais leads us on a heady, spellbinding journey through an interconnected world in which the artist strives to divert humankind’s headlong rush towards a terrible destiny. Here is a world in which friends and strangers, the living, the dead and those not yet born, are inextricably bonded by their often flawed but always splendid humanity. Yet again, Blais captivates with her urgent concerns, irrepressible empathy, and singular idiom: A Twilight Celebration is an astonishing literary accomplishment.