Augustino and the Choir of Destruction by Marie-Claire Blais , Translated by Nigel Spencer
In Augustino literary legend and three-time winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award Marie-Claire Blais delivers the final volume in the prize-winning trilogy (These Festive Nights, Thunder and Light, Augustino and the Choir of Destruction) acclaimed as one of the greatest undertakings in modern Quebec fiction.
Augustino and the Choir of Destruction is set on an island in the Gulf of Mexico that is home to the full spectrum of humanity: the rich, the poor, the powerful, the humble, artists, criminals. With her unique, signature use of punctuation, Marie-Claire Blais manages to brilliantly show in one flashing stroke men and women; victims and tormentors; child kamikaze pilots and petty thieves from Bahama Street; Charles, a great poet cut down by AIDS; Cinderella, a transvestite prostituting himself to a customer at the Porte du Baiser saloon; Caroline, an artist and photographer who has seen all the hidden treasures of the world; and Augustino, a clairvoyant child-writer. These individual destinies combine in Blais’ vision to form a single harmonic texture.
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