The latest work in internationally acclaimed author Marie-Claire
Blais's masterful novel cycle, A Twilight Celebration examines the
prophetic side of the writer and the burden that falls to him in a world
whose fate is yet to be determined.
Daniel, a middle-aged novelist and loving father alienated from one of
his sons and unsure how to care for his daughter, is on his way to an
international conference of writers. The gathering is to be held in the
forest above a mountain village of a strangely dreamlike nature. In the
twilight of the festival's setting, dreams, memories, nightmares, and
dark forebodings meld in Daniel's unsettled but deeply sympathetic
consciousness: He is haunted by pressing existential questions: What is
to be done? What are his responsibilities as a father, as a friend --
and as a writer? As Daniel confronts his own vanities, as he recalls the
activism but also the disappointments and betrayals of friends and
colleagues -- as he contends with, above all, the fears and aspirations
of his children in times marred by apocalypse, he asks, ultimately, what
can be done?
In what may well be the most beautiful and disturbing of her novels,
Marie-Claire Blais leads us on a heady, spellbinding journey through an
interconnected world in which the artist strives to divert humankind's
headlong rush towards a terrible destiny. Here is a world in which
friends and strangers, the living, the dead and those not yet born, are
inextricably bonded by their often flawed but always splendid humanity.
Yet again, Blais captivates with her urgent concerns, irrepressible
empathy, and singular idiom: A Twilight Celebration is an astonishing
literary accomplishment.
