By Judith Fitzgerald Oct 30, 2007, 15:08 GMT
Although readers will recognise characters and locales Michel Tremblay (a.k.a.The Maestro of Montréal Theatre) resurrects from earlier masterpieces, his freshest works, The Black Notebook and Assorted Candies / Bonbon assortis, will not disappoint. Rather, the former, the first in what promises to be an extraordinary trilogy of bittersweet remembrances, will break your heart. The latter, the concluding volume of Tremblay's endearing autobiographical quartet, will piece it together again.
Few will fail to empathise with the demi-heroine featuring in The Black Notebook's pages. Commencing with the ominously titled "Descent into Darkness," it quickly drops readers into the boiling cauldron of an obsessive diarist's excruciatingly introspective brain soup: Bitter and frank (yet irresistible and unforgettable). We see the shame, guilt, anxieties, and soul-searing humiliations of a young woman intent on battling cosmic confusion with writerly analysis: "Confiding to the blank page and admitting to my idiotic behaviour are my last hope, as usual."
Céline Poulin straightforwardly introduces herself as "desperately ordinary [at] twenty years old, not beautiful, a physique that's to say the least unusual, a waitress who works nights, hopelessly single." It soon becomes apparent that Céline is far from ordinary, even as she writes of herself, "I am an insignificant shadow who threads her way between the tables, a pair of hands that serves and never makes a mistake or spills the greasy dishes my customers order."
Her customers? "Hookers from the Main, drag queens, bums, and other creatures of the night" at a Montréal restaurant called Le Sélect, known as much for its ho-hum hamburger platters as its garish late-night clientèle.
The utterly human creature animated by Tremblay's magnificent imagination deepens and blossoms rapidly as she reveals the pair of rich worlds she negotiates, the interior (home) and exterior (work) meshing seamlessly.
Trademark Tremblay preoccupations, to be sure. Loathing each other, her parents clash and thrash about in their crippled interdependence. Céline's psychotically domineering mother finds refuge in rye benders, following which she attempts to atone for her histrionic binges by serving her eloquently silent husband and brattish brood an execrable shepherd's pie they pretend to enjoy. Relief. Its appearance signals the return of relative tranquillity.
Her work life is no less chaotic. Boss Nick and co-workers comprise one constellation of characters, customers the other; both fuel an explosive range of temperaments she attempts to convey in prose moving from the incisive to the inane, the pithy to the profound, but always charged with that exquisite quality whereby Tremblay makes luminous the quotidian:
"When my customers aren't happy they let me know and there's nothing subtle about it. Diplomacy is not their strong suit, many of them have been brought up with kicks in the ass and slaps upside the head, which makes for side effects in their behaviour."
Le Sélect's night creatures constitute an exotic, dignified, and disturbing crowd. Céline favours the former Frère Jean-Baptiste, teacher turned drag queen Jean-le-Décollé, who chose the night because "what he saw in daylight made him puke." Most are marginalised, grappling with sexual confusion while juggling johns, junk, jail, hormones, disease, suicide, and related dangers haunting their milieu.
A group of regular patrons, students from L'Institut des arts appliqués, don't quite fit the mould of day or night crowds. Among these aspiring furniture designers, languishing poseurs, and drifters is a charmer, Aimée, with whom Céline, after initially keeping her distance, forms a passionate bond. The flamboyant hysteric with a penchant for disguises draws Céline into her life, enlisting her as a companion in her earnest yet laughable acting aspirations. Céline, after much vacillation, becomes a minor assistant to her new friend determined to audition for The Trojan Women.
Moving inexorably from footlight to limelight throughout is the world that Euripides creates in his thoroughly depressing account of the fate of the women of Troy after its fall. That play's tragic theme resonates brilliantly with the predicament of all actors upon the various stages where Céline stars. Inevitably, a complex multilayered drama of colliding worlds erupts. The protagonist has more than her fair share of struggles, torments, and goals. And, Aimée, bien sur, possesses her own agenda, founded upon the fatally fantastic. Céline's disreputable Latin-Quarter dive involves a third situation with its attendant demands, issues, cheerleaders, and detractors. Such is life largesse.
Despite the sometimes inescapable seriousness of his material, Le Maestro will induce chortles, chuckles, and belly laughs in hapless readers (who cannot help but come face-to-face with far-too-familiar traits, foibles, misadventures, and illusions), not to mention expanding upon their delight in Tremblay's mastery of caricature. With a stroke here, a telling detail there, he creates characters who linger in the mind to participate in a marvellously mysterious mental dance.
With Assorted Candies / Bonbon assortis, the title of Tremblay's fourth book of autobiographical sketches (built upon the foundation of Montréal's Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood), the dance continues. The book features the lid of a chocolate box covering the goodies hidden under the bed of the narrator's mother. It helps heal a rift among various now-loveable characters comprising a kid's-eye view of one sprawling family.
When it comes time to come up with a suitable (and affordable) wedding gift, for lovely and lively example, the hilarious controversy over the present concludes where the abject humiliation of a young boy commences.
In "Sturm and Drang," a wicked thunderstorm presages a cataclysm in the mind of a child who loves to be terrified by his grandmother's story, famous in the family, about her brush with death by lightning. An equally sparkly vignette reveals the deep sensitivity of an innocent coming to terms with what's appropriate along the lines of toys for girls and boys.
Whether blackening pages with prose, memoir, poetry, or plays, the internationally revered playwright continues to prove his prowess, economically telegraphing the anguish of savaged youth evaporating into an anonymous and opaque past, which can only be rescued by brave new words and lovingly shaping a fictional world that magnifies, clarifies, and illuminates our own obdurate existence.
Taken together, readers will savour both, each of which is vintage Tremblay (out-Prousting Proust), filled with primal privations and inspirations of awe, a family's love and terrors, the stuff that makes a writer a writer: Relationships. Church. Lust. Rapture. Poverty. The enthralling works.
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A poetry fellow of the Chalmers' Arts Foundation, award-winning writer Judith Fitzgerald's O, Clytaemnestra!, the concluding volume in her critically acclaimed epic poem, THE ADAGIOS QUARTET, will be launched 4 November at Windsor's BookFest. She is currently completing "Leonard Cohen: Master of Song" (authorised by its subject who contributes eight original works of art to the Spring 2008 book). Visit http://www.judithfitzgerald.ca/.
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