Nights Too Short to Dance - by Marie-Claire Blais (Paperback)

About the Book

René, a trans man, confronts age and illness on a winter's night. Charismatic as ever, he is surrounded by friends and lovers. They look back over a century of struggle--Stonewall, the AIDS epidemic--and realize it's not over. But neither is the love. Blais, a queer literary icon, brings to life pivotal moments in the fight for queer rights.

Book Synopsis

René suddenly feels like an old man. Recovering at home after an illness, his mind will not leave the past. He is both comforted and annoyed by the officious care provided by his Russian nurse, who keeps referring to him as a woman. It is a lifetime struggle. Right now, René just wants to get out of his pajamas and dress elegantly, as in the old days of playing piano in cabarets. A friend--or lover--will surely visit? And they do. René is soon surrounded. By the writer Johnie, the musician Doudouline, the theologian Polydor, the painter l'Abeille, and Gérard, who was lost but never forgotten.
They support each other, offering shelter from the snowy world outside. They reminisce about past loves, tragedies, fights. The Stonewall riots. The AIDS epidemic where they lost so much. The Women's March on Washington. They steel themselves to take on the monster of bigotry and intolerance whenever it rears its ugly head, as it always does, again and again.
Most of all, they find comfort and hope in each other's presence and in the continuing struggle to assert our own identities, to love how we wish, and to not be defined by what society expects.
An icon of queer literature, Marie-Claire Blais's characters bring to life pivotal moments in the fight for queer rights.

Review Quotes

"Nights Too Short to Dance is an impassioned call for love, justice and collective action that, in Katia Grubisic's vibrant translation, thrums with poignancy and urgency--a work of vast empathy amid menacing times."

"A poetic rumination on what it means to live. Blais reminds us, in her novel filled to the brim with love, of the agonizing fleetingness of life."

"Though Blais is gone, her legacy remains, and now readers can enjoy a new, posthumously published novel in her distinctive voice."

"The novel weaves in and out and back and forth over more than 50 years.... It all comes out in a beautiful cacophony: love, fidelity, marriage, resistance, sex, aging, death.... Grubisic does an amazing job with the translation, capturing the youthfulness of the chorus of characters and René's passionate digressions."

"[Blais] left behind a remarkable literary edifice that, in the words of her almost exact contemporary Margaret Atwood, 'spoke from that seething, fermenting, francophone-Canadian sensibility - formed by decades of repression by the Duplessis mini-dictatorship and also by the Church.' Repression, in fact, might be considered the bête noire of the author's entire oeuvre, a force she battled against with every fibre of her writerly being. Nowhere is this more apparent than in her last novel."

"Will American Readers Ever Catch on to Marie-Claire Blais? The French-Canadian novelist--who has lived in Florida for decades--has been writing brilliant, original fiction for more than half a century...For one thing, her magnum opus--a cycle of ten short novels, the eighth of which was recently translated into English--is set in Florida, where she has lived for decades. More pertinently, she is...one of the most distinctive and original living writers of fiction."

"A novelist whose long, elliptical sentences and incisive explorations of human consciousness won her comparisons with Virginia Woolf and a place alongside Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood as one of Canada's greatest contemporary writers."