A Great Consolation

Survive! Survive! transports readers to September 1935, to glorious, tragic times in the colourful company of Ti-Lou and ＂the Duchess＂ Édouard, whose sparkling exchanges hide indissoluble pain; to sombre, twilight times with Victoire and Télesphore at the bottom of the ruelle des Fortifications, and between Josaphat and Laura Cadieux, his ill-fated daughter who wants at all costs to find her mother, Imelda Beausoleil. ＂How to survive?＂ they all ask, inextricably caught in life’s cycle of lost illusions and forgotten dreams. Even as this chronicle of resilience dwells in the difficulties and disenchantments of ordinary life, it reveals existences that accommodate a happiness that passes - always too fast and almost too late.

The series closes with Crossing the Gulf of Misfortune, whose action unfolds in August 1941, when the families of Nana and Gabriel unhappily cram together in a new apartment. Nana, inconsolable after the loss of her two eldest children to tuberculosis, is forced to live with Victoire and Édouard, as well as with Albertine, her husband Paul, and their children, Thérèse and baby Marcel. Outside this unbearably crowded household, war rages and rationing deprives everyone of basic necessities.

These characters don’t know what readers of Tremblay do: that in a year, in May 1942, Nana - the Fat Woman Next Door - seven months pregnant, will open the fabulous Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal ...

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 twenty-nine plays, thirty-one novels, six collections of autobiographical stories, a collection of tales, seven screenplays, forty-six translations and adaptations of works by foreign writers, nine plays and twelve stories printed in diverse publications, an opera libretto, a song cycle, a Symphonic Christmas Tale, and two musicals. His work has won numerous awards and accolades; 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.

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.