Like William Faulkner, one other author with whom she was usually in contrast, Ms. Blais believed that collective human experiences, together with evils like white supremacy and world warfare, have been the results of interior private conflicts, and that it was the obligation of the author to discover them.
“In writing you’re obliged to probe humanity’s wounds,” she advised The Globe and Mail newspaper in 1985. “It’s not amusing.”
Marie-Claire Blais was born on Oct. 5, 1939, in Quebec Metropolis. Her household was poor; her mom, Véronique (Nolin) Blais, had left her job as a instructor to boost Marie-Claire and her 4 siblings, and her father, Fernando, was a fridge technician.
She is survived by all 4 of her siblings, Michel, Robert, Thérèse and Helene.
Ms. Blais attended Roman Catholic faculties however left at 15 when her mother and father ran out of cash. She rented her personal residence, labored in a cookie manufacturing facility and a clothes retailer, and took evening courses in writing on the Université Laval in Quebec Metropolis.
She drew the eye of Jeanne Lapointe, an English professor, and Father Georges-Henri Lévesque, the vp of the Canada Council for the Arts, who helped her safe grants that allowed her to put in writing “La Belle Bête.”
Some 50 books adopted over the subsequent six a long time, together with 29 novels, 9 performs and three volumes of poetry. She gained virtually each prize obtainable to Canadian writers, together with 4 Governor Common’s Tutorial Medals, one of many nation’s highest literary honors.
She additionally gained reward from fellow Canadian writers. Robertson Davies, one of many nation’s main novelists of the twentieth century, known as her a “author with an unlimited capability for imaginative creation,” in a 1966 evaluate of “A Season within the Lifetime of Emmanuel” — although he additionally faulted her work as morose, saying he wished “that Mlle. Blais had a touch of humor in her composition, in order that she might inform a gothic phantom from a Halloween pumpkin.”