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Book Cover for: The Blue Notebook, Michel Tremblay

The Blue Notebook

Michel Tremblay

Finalist:Governor General's Literary Awards -Translation (2010)

When Fine Dumas's notorious transvestite Boudoir is shut down after Expo 67, Céline is condemned to go back to working as a waitress at Le Sélect, 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. Céline, 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 Québec show business and become emblematic of its 1960's culture. Based on an historic event, Osstidcho as it was called both in life and in the book, is a play on the powerful Québécois oath hostie (the sacred host) which, like fuck in English, is used as a noun, adjective, verb, adverb, and in this production, as a punning, truncated form of hostie de show -- one fucking great show.

As she has done twice before, Céline 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 Céline 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?

Book Details

  • Publisher: Talonbooks
  • Publish Date: Jan 19th, 2010
  • Pages: 288
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.30in - 5.40in - 0.70in - 0.75lb
  • EAN: 9780889226197
  • Categories: LiteraryUrban & Street LitWomen

About the Author

Fischman, Sheila: -

Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Sheila Fischman was raised in Ontario and is a graduate of the University of Toronto. She is a founding member of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada and has also been a columnist for the Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette, a broadcaster with CBCRadio, and literary editor of the Montreal Star. She now devotes herself full time to literary translation, specializing in contemporary Québec fiction, and has translated more than 125 Québec novels by, among others, Michel Tremblay, Jacques Poulin, Anne Hébert, François Gravel, Marie-Claire Blais, and Roch Carrier.

Sheila Fischman has received numerous honours, including the 1998 Governor General's Award (for her translation of Michel Tremblay's Bambi and Me for Talonbooks); she has been a finalist fourteen times for this award. She has received two Canada Council Translation Prizes and two Félix-Antoine Savard Awards from Columbia University. In 2000, she was invested into the Order of Canada and, in 2008, into the Ordre national du Québec, and, in 2008, she received the Canada Council for the Arts Molson Prize for her outstanding contributions to Canadian literature. She holds honorary doctorates from the Universities of Ottawa and Waterloo. Fischman currently resides in Montréal.

Tremblay, Michel: - A major figure in Québec literature, Michel Tremblay has built an impressive body of work as a playwright, novelist, translator, and screenwriter. To date Tremblay's complete works include forty-one plays, thirty novels, seven collections of autobiographical stories, a collection of tales, seven screenplays, forty-seven translations and adaptations of works by foreign writers, ten plays and fifteen stories printed in diverse publications, an opera libretto, a song cycle, a Symphonic Christmas Tale, and two musicals. His plays have been published and translated into forty languages and have garnered critical acclaim in Canada, the United States, and more than fifty countries around the world. He lives in Montréal.

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Praise for this book

"Tremblay's charters don't merely exist, they live out complex, sprawling lives"
-- Globe and Mail