Dear Pete ~
This seems the most appropriate place for this. I knew it was enroute [via other own conversations] and now that it's arrived, am posting it here, so you can appreciate first-hand the value of Judith's critiqueing... better to show-and-tell than copy-and-paste a bio, like before.
This is from today's [27 January 2007] The Globe and Mail ~
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/ ~ It's the lead [!!!] review [Michel le magnifique], and she said readers may need to register to view it; but she also told me that there's no charge for the first week so, " . . . it's free (with an email addie that works)."
You can see proof of the truth that she reads and communicates, and with the truth she sees... no less so with yours
. When it comes to writing, she's for value and worth. So, confirmation of this comes to you through her other-world, paid-by-the-word, reality. Enjoy
.
Love to you, both,
Lizzydoo
Michel le magnifique
JUDITH FITZGERALD
The Black Notebook
By Michel Tremblay
Translated by Sheila Fischman
Talonbooks, 224 pages, $19.95
Assorted Candies/Bonbon assortis
By Michel Tremblay
Translated by Linda Gaboriau
Talonbooks, 160 pages, $17.95
Although readers will recognize characters and locales Michel Tremblay
resurrects from earlier masterpieces, his freshest works, The Black
Notebook and Assorted Candies/Bonbon assortis, will not disappoint.
Rather, the former, the first in what promises to be an extraordinary
trilogy of bittersweet remembrances, will break your heart. The
latter, the concluding volume of Tremblay's endearing autobiographical
quartet, will piece it together again.
Few will fail to empathize with the demi-heroine featuring in The
Black Notebook's pages. Commencing with the ominously titled Descent
into Darkness, it quickly drops readers into the boiling cauldron of
an obsessive diarist's excruciatingly introspective brain soup: bitter
and frank, yet irresistible and unforgettable. We see the shame,
guilt, anxieties and soul-searing humiliations of a young woman intent
on battling cosmic confusion with writerly analysis: "Confiding to the
blank page and admitting to my idiotic behaviour are my last hope, as
usual."
Céline Poulin straightforwardly introduces herself as "desperately
ordinary [at] twenty years old, not beautiful, a physique that's to
say the least unusual, a waitress who works nights, hopelessly
single." It soon becomes apparent that Céline is far from ordinary,
even as she writes of herself, "I am an insignificant shadow who
threads her way between the tables, a pair of hands that serve and
never make a mistake or spill the greasy dishes my customers order."
Her customers? "Hookers from the Main, drag queens, bums and other
creatures of the night" at a Montréal restaurant called Le Sélect,
known as much for its ho-hum hamburger platters as its garish
late-night clientele.
The utterly human creature animated by Tremblay's magnificent
imagination deepens and blossoms rapidly as she reveals the pair of
rich worlds she negotiates, the interior (home) and exterior (work)
meshing seamlessly.
Trademark Tremblay preoccupations, to be sure. Loathing each other,
her parents clash and thrash about in their crippled interdependence.
Céline's psychotically domineering mother finds refuge in rye benders,
following which she attempts to atone for her histrionic binges by
serving her eloquently silent husband and brattish brood an execrable
shepherd's pie they pretend to enjoy. Relief. Its appearance signals
the return of relative tranquillity.
Her work life is no less chaotic. Boss Nick and co-workers comprise
one constellation of characters, customers the other; both fuel an
explosive range of temperaments she attempts to convey in prose moving
from the incisive to the inane, the pithy to the profound, but always
charged with that exquisite quality whereby Tremblay makes luminous
the quotidian:
"When my customers aren't happy they let me know and there's nothing
subtle about it. Diplomacy is not their strong suit, many of them have
been brought up with kicks in the ass and slaps upside the head, which
makes for side effects in their behaviour."
Le Sélect's night creatures constitute an exotic, dignified and
disturbing crowd. Céline favours the former Frère Jean-Baptiste,
teacher turned drag queen Jean-le-Décollé, who chose the night because
"what he saw in daylight made him puke." Most are marginalized,
grappling with sexual confusion while juggling johns, junk, jail,
hormones, disease, suicide and related dangers haunting their milieu.
A group of regular patrons, students from L'Institut des arts
appliqués, don't quite fit the mould of day or night crowds. Among
these aspiring furniture designers, languishing poseurs and drifters
is a charmer, Aimée, with whom Céline, after initially keeping her
distance, forms a passionate bond. The flamboyant hysteric with a
penchant for disguises draws Céline into her life, enlisting her as a
companion in her earnest yet laughable acting aspirations. Céline
assists her friend in auditioning for The Trojan Women.
Moving inexorably from background to foreground throughout is the
world that Euripides creates in his thoroughly depressing account of
the fate of the women of Troy after its fall. Its tragic theme
resonates brilliantly with the predicament of all actors upon the
various stages where Céline stars. Inevitably, a complex, multilayered
drama of colliding worlds erupts. The protagonist has more than her
fair share of struggles, torments and goals. And Aimée possesses her
own agenda, founded upon the fatally fantastic.
Despite the sometimes inescapable seriousness of his material,
Tremblay will induce chortles, chuckles and belly laughs in hapless
readers, not to mention expanding upon the delight readers will no
doubt take in his mastery of caricature. With a stroke here, a telling
detail there, he creates characters who linger in the mind to
participate in a marvellously mysterious mental dance.
The internationally revered playwright continues to prove his prowess,
economically telegraphing the anguish of savaged youth evaporating
into an anonymous and opaque past, which can only be rescued by brave
new words and lovingly shaping a fictional world that magnifies,
clarifies and illuminates our own obdurate existence.
Assorted Candies/Bonbons assortis, the title of Tremblay's fourth book
of autobiographical sketches (built upon the foundation of Montreal's
Plateau Mont-Royal neighbourhood), features the lid of a chocolate box
covering the goodies hidden under the bed of the narrator's mother. It
helps heal a rift among various now-loveable characters comprising a
child's-eye view of one sprawling family.
When it comes time to come up with a suitable (and affordable) wedding
gift, for lovely and lively example, the hilarious controversy over
the present concludes where the abject humiliation of a young boy
commences.
In Sturm and Drang, a wicked thunderstorm presages a cataclysm in the
mind of a child who loves to be terrified by his grandmother's story,
famous in the family, about her brush with death by lightning. An
equally sparkly vignette reveals the deep sensitivity of an innocent
coming to terms with what's appropriate along the lines of toys for
girls and boys.
It's vintage Tremblay (out-Prousting Proust), filled with primal
privations and inspirations of awe, a family's love and terrors, the
stuff that makes a writer a writer: Family. Church. Lust. Poverty. The
whole enthralling works.
Northern Ontarian Judith Fitzgerald's Electra's Benison, Book III of
her epic poem, has just been published.
]
my stomach hurts from laughing aloud!! Is there a publisher in the house?? I swear, I'll try to read this without quoting it back in entirety, but dang... it's hard to know where to pick up and stop with blocking for the Quote function 
. This is really unbelievable!!! I DO need some copies of it. I can't separate out what people would get and not... so much is intertwined with all we know of Leonard's world. You're unbelievable 
, till you write another