1898, au coeur des Laurentides. Après sept ans passés au couvent, Victoire tourne le dos à la vie de religieuse qui l'attendait et décide de rentrer à Duhamel pour retrouver son frère Josaphat, orphelin comme elle depuis le décès de leurs parents dans l'incendie de l'église du village.Dans cette élégie romanesque composée par Victoire, Michel Tremblay donne à entendre l'un de ses plus beaux hymnes à la vie, encore une fois porté par une voix de femme aux accents opératiques. Car nous savons tous, maintenant que les secrets de famille ont été dévoilés bribes par bribes à travers La Diaspora des Desrosiers et les Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal, que de ces deux orphelins incestueux vont naître Albertine puis Gabriel, le mari de la Grosse Femme et le père de Jean-Marc, alias Michel Tremblay. Mais cela n'a jamais été vraiment raconté, et cela devient un moment d'écriture de très haute intensité, transporté par la musique endiablée de l'interdit.

A rich, emotional, sweeping drama of anger and sorrow spanning three generations. The family house in the country is the setting for the story of Victoire and her descendants through her husband and through her true love―who also happens to be her brother. It is Victoire’s anger at being forced away from the family home and her sorrow at being separated from her dreamy, impractical, fiddle playing brother that fuel the machinery of 80 years of family relationships.

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, to a Cree mother and a French father, Réauna, affectionately known throughout Tremblay’s work as “Nana,” was sent with her two younger sisters, Béa and Alice, to be raised on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan, a francophone Catholic enclave of two hundred souls. At the age of ten, amid swaying fields of wheat under the idyllic prairie sky of her loving foster family, Nana is suddenly told by her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in five years and who now lives in Montreal, to come “home” and help take care of her new baby brother. So it is that Nana, with her faint recollection of the smell of the sea, embarks alone on an epic journey by train through Regina, Winnipeg, and Ottawa, on which she encounters a dizzying array of strangers and distant relatives, including Ti-Lou, the “she-wolf of Ottawa.” To our delight, Michel Tremblay here takes his readers outside Quebec for the first time, on a quintessential North American journey – it is 1913, at a time of industry and adventure, when crossing the continent was an enterprise undertaken by so many, young and old, from myriads of cultures, unimpeded by the abstractly constructed borders and identities that have so fractured our world of today. This, the first in Tremblay’s series of "crossings" novels, provides us with the back-story to the characters of his great Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal, particularly of his mother, “The Fat Woman Next Door …” and his maternal grandmother, who, though largely uneducated, was a voracious reader and introduced him to the world of reading and books, including Tintin adventure comics, mass-market novels, and The Inn of the Guardian Angel, which fascinated the young Tremblay with its sections of dramatic dialogue, inspiring the many great plays he would eventually write.

The story continues ... The second in Michel Tremblay's new series of novels presents two very different lives. We meet Maria as she leaves the city of Providence, Rhode Island, pregnant and alone. Two years later, we also meet Maria's older daughter, Rh�auna, as she disembarks the train at Windsor Station, having crossed the continent from her grandparents' farm in Saskatchewan, called home to Montreal to care for her one-year-old baby brother, Th�o, while Maria works. Along the way, Crossing the City affectionately and accurately depicts Montreal's Plateau neighbourhood at the beginning of the last century. Readers will delight in the small details of description, and Tremblay fans will revel in the backstory to the characters of his great Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal, particularly of his mother, celebrated as Nana throughout his work, including as his famous Fat Woman next door. In this novel, Nana is the young Rh�auna, reunited with her mother, Maria, for better or for worse. Crossing the City continues the Desrosiers Diaspora novel series.

A Crossing of Hearts continues Michel Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, a family saga set in Montreal during World War I. August 1915. Montreal is stifled by a heat wave while war rages in Europe. The three Desrosiers sisters – Tititte, Teena, and Maria – had been planning a whole week of vacation in the mountains, to do nothing but gossip, laugh, drink, and overeat while basking in the sun. Maria had decided to leave her children, Nana and Théo, in Montreal, in the care of a neighbour who gives her a hand when she needs it. Now Maria’s children come roaring into the kitchen, pink with pleasure, begging to come too. “I keep telling you, Momma, we’ll be as quiet as little mice,” Nana assures her. “We’ll hardly take up any room. You won’t even know we’re there.” Reluctantly, Maria takes her children along on the week-long trip to the Laurentians. As the reader views the journey through young Nana’s eyes, we come to understand the impoverished circumstances they leave behind in Montreal, only to find poverty ever more present in the country. Yet here it is surrounded by mountains, reflected in a lovely lake, and the blue sky gives them a moment of respite. It feels good to get out of town, and Tremblay’s writing remains so vivid that the reader imagines dipping into cool lake water along with the family. Encounters with rural relatives crystallize young Nana’s true feelings for her mother, as confidences and family secrets fuse day into night. This third novel in Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series bursts with life as Nana, the young city girl, explores the natural world – and the enchanted forest of her inner, maturing self. The novel also further develops the character of Maria so that we understand her motivations more fully, and at the same time recognize nods to the history of Quebec and the dynamics of the family under the strictures of the Catholic church.

At the crossroads at the end of childhood, Nana faces the hectic passing of her adolescence and the arrival of new responsibilities as her grandmother Joséphine approaches her last hours. To calm the storm, Nana reads the enthralling tales of Josaphat-le-Violon – a returning character in Tremblay’s Plateau-Mont-Royal Chronicles. Three of Josaphat’s fantastical stories contain revelations whose full influence in her own existence Nana cannot yet measure. In parallel, Nana’s rebellious mother Maria languishes back in Montréal. She is torn between her desire to gather her young family around her and her deep uncertainty about being able to care for them properly. Always in search of what’s “best” and what’s “elsewhere,” will Maria seize the opportunity “which only hits the door of life once”? Rite of Passage is the awaited fourth instalment in Michel Tremblay’s enthralling and intensely moving Desrosiers Diaspora series of novels, translated from French by the critically acclaimed and long-time Tremblay specialist Linda Gaboriau. Earlier instalments in the saga are Crossing the Continent (2008 Prix du grand public Salon du livre de Montréal / La Presse), Crossing the City (2009 Prix du grand public Salon du livre de Montréal / La Presse), and A Crossing of Hearts.

It's May 1922, and preparations are in full swing for the marriage of Nana and Gabriel, which will take place the following month. There's just one problem: Nana's wedding dress has yet to be bought. Nana's mercurial mother, Maria, torn between her desire to measure up as a mother and the inescapable constraints of poverty, wonders how to pay for the wedding. And she's not the only one battling demons - the thought of the upcoming reunion unsettles every member of the large and dispersed Desrosiers family. While the wedding invitations announce a celebration, they also stir up old memories, past desires, and big regrets.

En 1925, Louise Wilson, la Louve d’Ottawa, délaisse sa carrière de guidoune et rentre à Montréal. Lorsqu’elle débarque à la gare Windsor, cinq avenues s’ouvrent devant elle, cinq destins que Tremblay a décidé d’offrir en hommage à ce personnage tout aussi flamboyant que pathétique.

In Albertine in Five Times, Michel Tremblay portrayed one of his most unforgettable characters during five decades of her life, beginning in her thirties. Now, in Past Perfect, we meet Albertine at twenty and discover the dark secret of her being. Still reeling from the heartbreak that plunged her into a nervous breakdown, Albertine sets out to re-conquer the beau she has lost to her younger sister. On this fated Thursday evening, will she find the strength to survive the crisis that grips her very essence in this dark night of her soul? Or will she spend the rest of her days foundering in an endless rage that could extinguish all hope of love ever lighting up her life? In the eyes of her mother, Victoire, her brother, Édouard, and her sister, Madeleine, Albertine is a soul on fire that devours everything she touches. But in her own eyes, Albertine is sensitive, selfless, and devoted to the objects of her desires. In this extremity of contradiction between the way we see ourselves and the way others see us, Tremblay stages the agony of the imagination in chains, the tragedy of an understanding of the imagination as a way to the “truth,” rather than as a path to understanding. Caught in this dilemma, Albertine, who has cast herself as a sacrificial lamb, a victim of destiny, the queen of unhappiness, descends into a hell of lucidity as she confronts Alex, the great hope and passion of her youth. Cast of three women and two men.

Le Paradise est ce club du Red Light de Montréal qui, en 1930, accueille les vieux garçons dans un espace nommé le ringside. C'est là qu'Édouard Tremblay aimerait bien faire son entrée dans le "grand monde", peu après son embauche comme vendeur de chaussures sur l'avenue du Mont-Royal. Car à presque dix-huit ans, il est déjà emporté par le double qui l'habite, cette duchesse de Langeais qui deviendra son personnage de folle des nuits de la métropole. Et c'est aussi au Paradise que travaille la mère de Nana, Maria Desrosiers, toujours aux prises avec "cette boule dans la gorge, ce poids sur son coeuur". Autour d'elles s'agitent les membres des deux familles, à la merci de ce "maudit destin qui ne mène jamais où on veut aller" : Ti-Lou et Maurice, Victoire et Télesphore, Albertine et Madeleine, Teena, et l'inconsolable Josaphat-le-Violon, qui se réfugie à l'asile Saint-Jean-de-Dieu.

Dans cette éblouissante chronique de septembre 1935, le « monde » de Michel Tremblay vit des heures émouvantes, encore et encore et encore. Heures glorieuses et tragiques avec Ti-Lou et Édouard en duchesse, un duo coloré dont les échanges pétillants cachent des douleurs indissolubles, même sous le parfum du gardénia. Heures crépusculaires et sombres avec Victoire et Télesphore au fond de la ruelle des Fortifications, entre Josaphat et Laura Cadieux, sa fille infortunée qui veut à tout prix retrouver sa mère, Imelda Beausoleil. Cette chronique de résiliences, si elle ouvre les tiroirs des vies difficiles et désenchantées du monde ordinaire, fait voir aussi des existences qui s’accommodent du bonheur qui passe, toujours trop vite et presque trop tard : Tititte et le docteur Woolf au restaurant du neuvième étage d’Eaton ; Théo au cinéma avec la belle Fleurette ; Maria l’impétueuse en voyage à Québec avec Fulgence. Ah ! Maria… se laisser aimer pourrait-il devenir une façon de survivre à son incurable mal de vivre ? Ah ! Ti-Lou… que faire de ses cinquante paires de souliers kitsch, maintenant qu’elle n’a plus qu’une jambe ? Oh ! Édouard… réussira-t-il ou ratera-t-il son entrée au Paradise, déguisé en femme pour la première fois et aspergé de gardénia ? Ah ! Teena… pourra-t-elle supporter son fils Ernest qui débarque chez elle sans prévenir ? Comment survivre ? se demandent tous ces personnages, aux prises avec les situations inextricables des âges de la vie, le cycle des illusions perdues et des rêves oubliés. Victoire, dans un aveu terrible, résume ainsi son exaspération et sa désespérance : « Chus tannée ! M’entends-tu ? Chus tannée ! J’en ai assez ! De toute ! Pas juste de toé ! De moé, aussi ! Du maudit appartement ! De la maudite job de concierge ! T’es juste un paresseux, Télesphore ! T’es pas un poète, t’es pas un rêveur, t’es un sans-cœur ! »

Neuvième et dernier volet de La diaspora des Desrosiers, cette chronique du malheur campe son action en août 1941, au moment où les familles de Nana et de Gabriel s’entassent dans un nouvel appartement, rue Fabre. Nana, toujours inconsolable après la perte de ses deux aînés, victimes de la tuberculose, doit cohabiter avec Victoire et Édouard, ainsi qu’avec Albertine, son mari, Paul, et leurs enfants, Thérèse et Marcel, encore bébé. La maisonnée devient un lieu de promiscuité difficile à vivre, alors que la guerre fait rage et que les rations privent tous du nécessaire. Les personnages ignorent ce que les lecteurs savent déjà : dans un an, en mai 1942, la Grosse Femme, enceinte de sept mois, ouvrira les fabuleuses Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal…

It is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau Mont Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer. Seven women in this raucous Francophone working-class Montreal neighbourhood are pregnant—only one of them, “the fat woman,” is bearing a child of true love and affection. Next door to the home that is by times refuge, asylum, circus-arena, confessional and battleground to her extended family, with ancient roots in both rural Quebec and the primordial land of the Saskatchewan Cree, stands an immaculately kept but seemingly empty house where the fates, Rose, Mauve, Violet and their mother Florence, only ever fleetingly and uncertainly glimpsed by those in a state of emotional extremis, are knitting the booties of what will become the children of a whole new nation. In this first of six novels that became his Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, Tremblay allows his imagination free reign, fictionalizing the lives of his beloved characters, dramatized so brilliantly in his plays and remembered so poignantly in his memoirs.“The fat woman” both is and is not Michel Tremblay’s mother—her extended family and neighbours more than a symbol of a colonized people: abandoned and mocked by France; conquered and exploited by England; abused and terrorized by the Church; and forced into a war by Canada supporting the very powers that have crushed their spirit and twisted their souls since time immemorial. This is a “divine comedy” of the extraordinary triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people caught up by circumstances that span the range of the ridiculous to the sublime.

This is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay’s Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author’s own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working-class Montreal neighbourhood populated by eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions. Three schoolgirls, “Thérèse ’n’ Pierrette” and their friend Simone, are caught up in the dark mysteries of their rites of passage: innocence moving into experience; life into birth. Circling around their uncertainties are cold, merciless predators, ready to strike at the slightest sign of weakness—the vicious hypocrisy of the Church, the cruel ignorance of the petty bourgeoisie, and the burning lust of the child molester.

A 30 ans, Albertine sait déjà que la grandeur du ciel n'arrivera jamais à contenir sa rage de vivre. A mesure qu'avance l'horloge de son destin, le moteur du monde se met à tourner à vide et ses enfants chavirent : Thérèse n'a jamais valu une larme et Marcel sombre dans la folie. Ainsi Albertine survit-elle à 70 ans, en ayant abandonné la vie, préférant entretenir, dans la polyphonie de ses âges et loin du danger des hommes, un grand malheur tragique au lieu d'un petit bonheur médiocre comme celui de sa soeur Madeleine. « Les signes du Ciel viennent rarement d'en haut », disait leur mère Victoire.L'«oeuvre de Michel Tremblay compte une trentaine de pièces de théâtre et une vingtaine de romans et récits. Plusieurs pièces qui appartiennent à son »Cycle des Belles-Soeurs« ont été produites à travers le monde.»

(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal—an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays—deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay’s metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.) This is the third volume in Michel Tremblay’s six-volume Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal, an epic series of novels which imagines, in prose, the lives of the characters of Tremblay’s plays, in which each of them acts out their own personal drama: their loves, their disappointments, their travails, their agony and their ecstasy. It is in the novels, however, that these characters are seen in their context of time and space: the neighbourhood in which Tremblay and his extended family lived and grew up. The Duchess and the Commoner focuses on Albertine’s brother, Édouard, brother-in-law to ‘the fat woman’ and uncle to Marcel, and to the ‘fat woman’s’ son. In ths volume, Édouard launches his forays into the 1940’s world of Montréal show-business and creates his own astonishing role within it. As with all the novels in this series, a certain sense of wonder, even magic, emanates from the grandmother, Victoire, which in this episode is seen flowing through Édouard to his nephew, the brilliant and disturbed Marcel.

Bonbons Assortis / Assorted Candies is Michel Tremblay’s fourth (and he says last) book of autobiographical narratives inspired by his childhood and youth. Like the previous three volumes, which celebrate the books, plays and films that shaped his imagination and writing life, this collection of eight delightful stories takes us back to Tremblay’s formative years in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal, offering the reader poignant and joyful childhood memories as varied as the assorted candies his mother hoarded under her bed, to be shared only on the most festive or dramatic of family occasions. Here we get to see the world through the eyes of young Michel, who is often discovered observing the other nine members of the bustling household on Fabre Street from his hiding place under the dining-room table. His mother, Nana (immortalized in the play For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again ), dominates these memories; but the tender, cherished moments shared with his father, along with his prickly paternal grandmother and irascible aunt (who inspired his unforgettable character Albertine), also profoundly shape this child’s view of the world. Neighbours, from whom the family haplessly tries to hide their poverty with dignity, brothers and an uncle (who, telephoning from the local tavern, claims to be Santa calling from the North Pole), complete the rich and colourful cast of characters in this exquisite remembrance of childhood past.

In Birth of a Bookworm, Michel Tremblay takes the reader on a tour of the books that have had a formative influence on the birth and early development of his creative imagination. Included are his readings of and reactions to some of the great classics of world literature by such writers as the Comtesse de Ségur, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson and, above all, the Brothers Grimm. One of the great moments in this very personal voyage of literary discovery is Tremblay’s astonishingly revelatory and prescient account of a summer spent regaling his little friends with his invented alternate endings to the story of Snow White. Here, more than anywhere else, do we get a sense of an author emerging from the received magic of his encounters with stories, and discovering his own need to tell them anew, with the fresh, contemporary sensibility of his own time, place and circumstance. As in the other two volumes in “the education of Michel Tremblay”—his memoir of the formative films in his life, Bambi and Me, and his first encounters with the world of the theatre, Twelve Opening Acts—Birth of a Bookworm is first and foremost a love story of Michel for his muses, ushered into his life and hovered over with the acute care and concern of his match-making mother. As in all of Tremblay’s work, the physical and emotional world of his childhood is celebrated as the fertile ground on which his new, vivid way of seeing and imagining is built.

Alongside his dozens of fascinating and award-winning plays, and in addition to this great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal series of six epic novels, his translations, adaptations, librettos, and acute portrayals of human emotions in a state of both crisis and redemption, Michel Tremblay has left his readers with three magical keys to the secrets of his great literary achievements. The first of these, Bambi and Me [ Les Vues animés, Leméac, 1990], is a memoir of the movies that shaped his imagination as a child-those he watched in fascination and spent hours deconstructing with his mother, and those he watched on his own. The second, Twelve Opening Acts [ Douze Coups de Théâtre, Leméac, 1992], is an account of Tremblay’s discovery of the theatre as an from his first breathtaking recognition of how the imagination is actually a public construct, while watching a performance of Babar the Elephant at the age of six; to his winning of the CBC drama competition with his first play, Le Train . Between these parenthetical stories, Michel Tremblay offers the reader an entrance into his discovery of the theatricality of life itself-the personal dramas of his homosexuality, the death of his mother, the increasingly frail withdrawing of his father, even the completely unintentional, almost apolitical creation of his nationalist awareness-are recounted in narratives at once devoid of judgment, but at the same time ennobled with a complexity and intensity of passion operatic in its scope and merciless in its sweep. This is the most ruthless and unsparing, yet tender and evocative insight Tremblay has ever offered into the creation of his literary genius.

«Momaaan... ― Toi, quand tu me parles comme ça, c'est parce que tu veux avoir quequ'chose... ― C'est juste une question que je veux te poser... ― La réponse a besoin d'être courte, parce qu'y faut que je prépare la pâte pour les pâtés à' viande. ― C'est au sujet de la crèche. ― Qu'est-ce qu'elle a, la crèche, tu la trouves pas belle, ma crèche ?» L'enfance de Michel Tremblay est un coffre aux trésors inépuisable. Bonbons assortis nous avait comblés de bonheur avec des récits sur Luis Mariano, le père Noël et les petits Chinois à vendre. Le dramaturge nous offre ici un bouquet d'instantanés avec sa mère Nana, son père, son frère, ses tantes, sa grand-maman paternelle... À l'innocence curieuse de jeune garçon se mêle un brin de mauvaise foi quand s'enchaînent les questions cocasses et sans réponse. En découlent de savoureuses conversations au ton résolument drolatique.

Alors qu’il vient de terminer l’écriture de sa pièce Enfant insignifiant !, Michel Tremblay voit ses personnages le rejoindre et lui jouer les scènes de sa prime jeunesse qu’il vient d’écrire. Les souvenirs d’un homme vieillissant deviennent l’occasion de dialogues savoureux et cocasses où la mauvaise foi de l’enfant s’enroule à celles de sa mère Nana, de son père Gabriel, de sa grand-mère Victoire, de son amie Ginette, etc. Ces conversations avec l’enfant curieux qu’était l’auteur à l’époque où il n’en finissait pas de questionner le monde – de vouloir en comprendre le sens et l’organisation, l’étrange mouvement de ses mystères et de ses mensonges – nous en apprennent beaucoup sur l’origine de son œuvre dramatique et romanesque : le premier vrai monde de Michel Tremblay, celui de sa famille, s’y trouve révélé dans toute sa merveilleuse humanité, avec une bonne dose de franche hilarité.

Ce petit bouquet de souvenirs et d’amitiés, empreint d’émotion douces et fines, appartient à la veine intimiste du mémorialiste (Les Vues animées, Douze coups de théâtre, Un ange cornu avec des ailes de tôle, Bonbons assortis et Conversations avec un enfant curieux). À mesure que ces petites épiphanies s’échappaient de ses archives privées – des révélations marquantes qu’il n’a jamais racontés auparavant –, il en a retrouvé les frissons et les bonheurs avec son immense et infaillible mémoire affective, cette toujours irrésistible intelligence du cœur. Mais attention, il les raconte, ces secrets bien mal gardés, comme s’ils étaient ceux d’un autre Michel…

It is June 20, 1952, a decade after the events described in The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, the first volume of Michel Tremblay’s series of autobiographical fiction. The mystic, yet palpable instant of summer’s arrival is experienced simultaneously by the fat woman’s son (who is never named) and Marcel. These moving, profoundly different epiphanies of a transforming world, seen through the memories of the characters, set the stage for the action of the novel which takes place in the space of this single, evocative day. The fat woman’s son experiences this moment as an episode of profound personal objectification—he sees himself as in a photo of that larger, inclusive moment. Marcel, on the other hand, literally seizes the moment, and stores it in his school bag as a physical thing. It is also the day of final exams at the École Saint-Stanislas where the fat woman’s son, a boy who lives inside the books he loves, is in the “gifted” class, and his cousin Marcel, the “mad” family terror, is in the class for “slow learners.” Racked by envy at what he sees as Marcel’s genius—his ability to create and function in another dimension of reality—the gifted child blanks out during the French exam. The first quarter of the moon—which rises over the final scenes of the novel in which the fat woman’s son recognizes and acknowledges his cousin Marcel’s genius—is an exquisitely crafted and resonant metaphor for the symbiotic relation between the imaginary and the real, the privileged “educated elite” and the “great unwashed,” innocence and experience, sanity and madness.

Libro usado en buenas condiciones, por su antiguedad podria contener señales normales de uso

An evening at the opera spills out onto the street and into an odyssey through Montreal by night. The narrator, both innocent and cynical, rushes headlong down what appears to be the road to ruin―or perhaps merely to the loss of his virginity. We follow him from a café called El Cortijo (spanish for a country house with a farm building attached) to a nightclub called the Four Corners of the World. This is an urban metaphor for the classic story of the shrewd country boy bedazzled and led astray by the bright lights of the big city. We discover along with him a burlesque world of transgression and madness, where pleasures are far from simple and love is somewhat less than pure. On the street, as at the opera, passions are on the loose and truth and falsehood leave their marks in the service of the urgencies of desire. Will our hero find love and pleasure after all? This evocative account of his adventure is stamped with the ironic and the affectionate wit and humour that characterize all of Michel Tremblay’s novels and memoirs. Drawing its fiction from many of the autobiographical sketches to be found in Bambi and Me, Twelve Opening Acts and Birth of a Bookworm, and from a collision of the Francophone east and the Anglophone west of Montreal, this novel marks a hiatus between Tremblay’s six-volume Chroniques and his more contemporary novel, The Heart Laid Bare .

Deux adolescents de 16 ans, Jean-Marc en 1958 et Manu en 2008, sont aux prises avec la révélation familiale de leur homosexualité. Dans un habile chassé-croisé d'époques, les mensonges de la censure catholique et de la morale pseudo-libérée ont de curieux airs de parenté.

An extended tour de force with no act or scene breaks, Marcel Pursued by the Hounds examines how our “innocent” childhood games and fantasies can come back to haunt us in adult life, full of the dangers and realities that were invisible to us as children. An extended dialogue between the characters Marcel (one of the main characters in Tremblay’s novel The First Quarter of the Moon) and Thérèse (one of the main characters in the novel Thérèse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel), illuminated by a chorus of the fates, it is Michel Tremblay’s toughest, most uncompromising play to date. Cast of 4 women and 1 adolescent male.

March, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Edouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay’s Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana—The Fat Woman who is here finally named—is gravely ill and her days are numbered. How will he, with his exaggerated sensitivity, his visions, his ongoing struggle with “reality” pit his fertile imagination against this inexorable march of death? In five epiphanic visions that take us from a nineteenth-century London pub to a reworking of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, Marcel uses his gift of the creative imagination to break the eternal spiral of new beginnings, and to thumb his nose at despair and resignation. Presented here, side by side, is Tremblay’s fictionalized account of the death of his own mother, so lovingly enacted in his new play, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. In what becomes a coda to his great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal cycle of novels, Tremblay creates, with grace and tenderness, a redemption and transcendent grandeur for these familiar and beloved characters: A Thing of Beauty.

En Pièces Détachées is Michel Tremblay’s look at “The Main” in Montreal. The play concerns Hélène, a waitress who used to work in a bar called the Coconut Inn, but who now works slinging smoked meat in a joint on Papineau Street. She is married to Henri, who sits around all day watching Captain Cartoons on television. They live in a tenement in the East End with their daughter, Francine, and Hélène’s mother, Robertine. During the course of the play, Hélène’s retarded brother, Claude, who has been “sent away” and who wears “sunglasses and speaks English” as his passport to the world, runs away from the brothers at the sanitorium and returns home for a little visit. En Pièces Détachées was first performed in Montreal in 1969. It was broadcast over French language CBC-TV in 1971 and 1972, drawing the largest audience in Quebec for a televised dramatization of a play. Cast of four women and two men.

In the heart of the Latin Quarter, meeting place of marginal characters of all sorts, Céline Poulin works the night shift at a cheap and popular restaurant, Le Sélect, serving hamburger platters and spaghetti and meatballs to student misfits, transvestites, hookers and queens from the Main―Montreal’s disreputable Boulevard Saint-Laurent. Hanging out with a theatre company in her off hours, Céline sees opening before her a world where it is not only possible, but even desirable to pretend. When the director offers her a role in The Trojan Women, the die is cast. The Black Notebook is Céline’s diary, her account of her trials and tribulations, her expectations and her cruel disappointments, because this young waitress at Le Sélect has her own dramatic story to tell, even if only to Céline is a midget. From the theatre of Euripides to the theatre of Montreal’s Main, Michel Tremblay―our Balzac―creates and gives voice to some astonishing new characters in this first of a new series of novels. For the characters of The Black Notebook, the first in this trilogy, life is a comedy that barely conceals the cruel and pitiless tragedy of the everyday. With a transcendent eloquence and compassion, Michel Tremblay celebrates how it is possible for Céline to embrace her difference and to flourish―despite that difference, or perhaps, because of it.

It’s 1967. Change is everywhere in the air. The Quebec independence movement has been endorsed by Charles de Gaulle's famous “Vive le Québec libre!” and things will never be the same. But unlike the Plateau novels, wherein Michel Tremblay's beloved characters are seen from the perspective of a child destined to discover the defining characteristic of his own otherness as gay, the Notebooks are narrated in the voice of a young woman, one whose difference is defined by her highly visible physical deformity—Céline Poulin is a midget. Having always maintained that he does not write politics, but fables, Tremblay here celebrates how it is possible for Céline to embrace her difference and to flourish in a community of others with transcendent eloquence and compassion. This is the second novel in Tremblay’s Notebooks series.

When Fine Dumas’s notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down after Expo 67, Celine is condemned to go back to working as a waitress at the Select, attending to the frustrated appetites and exquisite pathos of its exotic clientele. Then a newcomer appears, the gorgeous Gilbert Forget, a musician who is not insensitive to her charms. Celine, a midget who has always thought she was unworthy, never having imagined the possibility of a mature loving and sexual relationship in her life, throws herself into a passionate affair with Gilbert, discovering the body’s thrills for the first time. Hanging out with his new crowd of artists and performers, she gets a backstage look at a project that’s going to revolutionize Quebec show business and become emblematic of its 1960s culture. As she has done twice before, Celine records the events and adventures of her life in a notebook. But now, inspired by the agony and ecstasy of first love, she reaches for the heights of romantic prose: while The Black Notebook, her first, is a simple daily journal; and The Red Notebook, her second, is a memory book, in which she records her life in retrospect embellished with rhetorical commentary; in The Blue Notebook Celine steps outside of herself, using a narrator to tell her story. Having finally discovered herself, she is now also finally free of that self. Will her tempestuous relationship with Gilbert endure? Will there be a fourth installment?

Conçu bien des années avant qu'il ne se trouve élaboré dans les Chroniques du plateau Mont-Royal, Édouard paraît pour la première fois sous les traits de la duchesse de Langeais, déjà outrageante, mais implacablement authentique, impitoyablement vraie dans la recherche de sa vérité. Éditée d'abord en 1973, la pièce Hosanna nous propose des personnages également familiers aux lecteurs des Nouvelles d'Édouard; et sont issus d'un univers qui a su donner le ton à notre dramaturge et qui plaçait déjà Michel Tremblay parmi les meilleurs écrivains contemporains.

A play within a play. A young playwright draws on his family as the raw material for his first work. Cast of four women and three men.

Louise Tétrault, jeune waitress de Saint-Eustache, veut tenter sa chance à Montréal après avoir gagné le trophée Lucille Dumont. Mais sa soeur Lola Lee, de son vrai nom Rita Tétrault, ne l'entend pas ainsi. Métamorphosée par son expérience de chanteuse sur la Main, elle craint de perdre une gloire durement acquise et entraîne Louise dans l'arrière-scène des clubs montréalais pour la décourager. Cette virée devient un voyage initiatique dans les coulisses du monde des paillettes et de l'extravagance, où chaque protagoniste semble se brûler les ailes en se rapprochant d'une vérité inaccessible. Quarante-cinq ans après sa création, cette oeuvre est plus actuelle que jamais. Quel prix faut-il payer - de son corps, de son sang, de sa liberté - pour grimper l'échelle de la gloire, cette côte qui «s'monte à pied, mais si se r'descend en bicyble?

In Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra, Michel Tremblay examines the sacred and the profane—their similarities and differences; how they merge and become one another. The play consists of two interweaving monologues on religion and sex spoken by Manon (from Forever Yours, Marie-Lou) and Sandra (from Hosanna). In the end, both characters realize that they have been “invented” by the author.

It has been some time since Luc, a 32-year-old actor and Jean-Marc, a 38-year-old French teacher, have seen each other, but the wounds from their seven year love affair are only partially healed. Each of them has current worries as well: Jean-Marc, apparently secure and well off, is tired of the endless procession of insensitive and seductive students; he has also realized that he will never be the great novelist he had hoped to become. He feels, in a word, mediocre. Luc, after years as an obscure stage actor, has found popular success playing “a nut case with a lisp” on a TV sitcom, but along with fame has come an unexpected and unwelcome loss of privacy and a struggle for self-respect. To make matters worse, Luc’s father is dying. During this evening at Jean-Marc’s house, the two men dredge up the good and the bad memories; they confront each other about past injustices; they examine each other’s grey hairs; finally, they confess their fears and disillusionments and they comfort each other.

Talonbooks is pleased to announce a new edition of one of Michel Tremblay's most unusual novels. First published in English translation by M&S in 1989 under the title The Heart Laid Bare [Le coeur decouvert, Lemeac, 1986], British and American rights to this novel were sold to Serpent's Tail, who published this same book under a different title, Making Room, which is now out of print. This new Talonbooks edition proudly restores this novel to its rightful place in Tremblay's sweeping and compassionate imagination of human sensibility and passion. Jean-Marc has fallen in love. The object of his affection is Mathieu, a young actor working as a salesman at Eaton's while waiting for his big break. As a dowry to their new relationship, Mathieu brings Sebastien, his son. Jean-Marc, a fusty academic, is not sure about being able to make room in his life for this four-year-old boy. While daring, for some even shocking when it first appeared in the 1980s, this story has, like Tremblay's entire ouevre, stood the test of time and revealed itself to be a work of both enduring and prophetic vision The Heart Laid Bare marks a significant departure for Michel Tremblay, because it is the first of his mature novels which is not set in the semi-autobiographical milieu of his childhood. Yet this thoroughly contemporary love story is told with all the warmth and empathy that is so characteristic of all of his other work.

Mathieu, compagnon de Jean-Marc depuis dix ans, le quitte pour Key West. Là, il découvre ce lieu mythique devenu l'un des mouroirs de l'Amérique. Il apprend à accepter la douleur et à affronter le sentiment de culpabilité qui l'assaille.

French

À soixante-seize ans, Marcel a passé le plus clair de sa vie à l’ombre – enfermé à vingt-trois ans dans l’étrange asile de Nominingue, au fin fond des Laurentides, il est toujours au pied de ses mystérieuses et menaçantes montagnes, plus de cinquante ans plus tard, bien qu’on l’ait laissé sortir. Ces montagnes, il les peint, avec beaucoup de ciel. Il peint aussi la mer, qu’il n’a jamais vue « en vrai ». Et comme dans une tardive tentative de libération, le voilà qui se lance dans un projet inédit : écrire son journal. Remonter le fil d’une folie qui l’a mis à l’isolement – malgré les visites de sa mère morte et de son chat imaginaire. Dans cette variation d’une grande douceur sur l’évaporation du temps et la terrible violence faite à une âme simple, les lecteurs fidèles reconnaîtront un personnage qu’ils ont vu grandir dans les Chroniques du Plateau-Mont-Royal. Mais s’il fleurit comme un nouveau bourgeon de l’œuvre-arbre de Michel Tremblay, Le peintre d’aquarelles se lit comme le roman unique et bouleversant d’une vie volée.

Arrivée au paradis, Nana ne perd rien de sa verve et de sa mauvaise foi, son sens du théâtre et ses réparties assassines. Surprise! elle se retrouve entre sa belle-mère et sa propre mère! (Créée le 12 août 2008 pour fêter le quarantième anniversaire des Belles-soeurs.