Swirling Blais novel like jazz

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This article was published 28/11/2009 (6131 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom

By Marie-Claire Blais, translated by Nigel Spencer

Anansi, 201 pages, $22

CHECKING an online dictionary, you’ll find maelstrom defined as "a very powerful whirlpool; a large, swirling body of water … the Nordic word is borrowed from the Dutch maalstroom which means grinding stream."

It is a perfect description for this swirling stream-of-consciousness novel about artists, thieves and teenagers coping with contemporary society in the new millennium.

Winning the 2008 Governor General’s Literary Award in its original French, it has recently been translated by Nigel Spencer, who has won two GGs himself for translating other Blais novels.

Blais is a legend in Quebec letters with 15 published works of fiction, almost all critically acclaimed.

This translation feels right, from beginning to end. This can’t have been easy as there are thousands of commas and only a few periods and question marks in the whole text, but the rhythm essential in the French is present in the English version as well.

One way to approach the novel is to read it aloud, possibly to your partner at bedtime. Be warned, though. It’s not suitable foreplay, as it can be grim, but it sounds fantastic and is loaded with sensual and visceral images.

It is jazz, but not smooth jazz. Sometimes it is bebop, sometimes Latin. There is pleasure in the rhythm and poetry of the language. If you can let go, the sense will come to you.

You could also approach the novel with a pen in hand and some notepaper to mark the scene changes and catalogue the characters and build the time line of the story.

So what actually happens in the book; is there a plot, a story? Yes, not one but many, all swirling around the family at the centre gathering for Christmas dinner on the Gulf of Mexico.

Many of the horrors of the 20th century, and some dating back to the 17th, are catalogued here, though always from a specific image to the general idea. These include slavery, racism, segregation, the Holocaust, poverty, injustice, Catholic priests molesting children, AIDS, euthanasia and global warming.

But far from being reportage or a polemic, this is a work of art, fulfilling Blais’ definition in the novel of art as "contained aggression."

To an English reader, this novel keeps company with James Joyce’s Ulysses and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway. Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano echoes in the Guatemalan bus trip, wonderfully rendered with a standout portrayal of a "fireman/mid-wife" trying to a reassure a 16-year-old mother about to give birth that he will assist her even if he has to give up three days of leave.

What distinguishes this novel from its antecedents is Blais’ use of multiple consciousness and her unapologetic social and political analysis.

Blais portrays characters making moral choices, and making a difference, if sometimes just one person at a time. Despite her portrayal of existential anguish and the threat of a coming apocalypse in language of Biblical proportion, she offers glimpses of peace and joy in meditation and art. Ultimately, Blais suggests, the maelstrom can be survived with love and family.

Victor Enns is a Winnipeg writer whose first book review, of an early Blais novel, David Stern, was published in the U of M’s Manitoban in 1973.