Mai at the Predators' Ball - (Soifs Cycle) by Marie-Claire Blais (Paperback)

About the Book

Translation of: Mai au bal des predateurs.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award: Translation. Shortlisted for the Cole Foundation Prize for Translation.

Literary legend and four-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award Marie-Claire Blais delivers the latest installment in her ongoing portrait of life in contemporary North America.

In this swirling fresco, we meet unforgettable characters, some familiar from previous works, some new. This time, Blais lets us into the consciousness of fifteen-year-old Mai, an unusually perceptive young woman whose uncensored observations on femininity and youth, freedom and constraint belie her age. And, in the Porte du Baiser Saloon, we meet a group of boys who adorn themselves in colourful dresses and wigs before they take to the stage to sing and dance every evening after darkness falls. They open their arms to those who are excluded -- both men and women, triumphant and threatened, both free and bound.

With this astonishing new novel, Blais gives us a remarkable chronicle of our modern age teeming with characters who seem to represent the whole of humanity. She invites us to share the drama of perfect joy, the tragedy of happiness, and she gives us her best work yet.

Review Quotes

... [a]hallucinatory and poetic story, ripe for underlining and rereading ... Mai at the Predator's Ball will reward you.--Zoe Whittall "Globe and Mail"

Spencer admirably captures what one might call the 'breath' of Blais' prose, although this is a somewhat misleading term, since, unlike the oral style of Joyce's paradigmatic Finnegans Wake, Blais' narration, exploiting the French tradition of the segmented sentence, is very much a written form. This difference in language and literary tradition presents the translator with a serious challenge, which Spencer has met with wonderful skill.-- "Cole Foundation Prize for Translation"

About the Author

Marie-Claire Blais is the internationally revered author of more than twenty-five books, many which have been published around the world. In addition to the Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction, which she has won four times, Blais has been awarded the Gilles-Corbeil Prize, the Me´dicis Prize, the Molson Prize, and Guggenheim Fellowships. She divides her time between Quebec and Florida.

Nigel Spencer is a two-time winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation, as well as being an author and editor. He has translated several works by Marie-Claire Blais, including Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction, and Rebecca, Born in the Maelstrom.