Thing of Beauty

March, 1963, and winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, ThÈrËse, Edouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay's Chronicles of Plateau Mont-Royal are here again, twenty years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie NanaóThe Fat Woman who is here finally namedóis gravely ill and her days are numbered. How will he, with his exaggerated sensitivity, his visions, his ongoing struggle with "reality, "pit his fertile imagination against this inexorable March of death? In five epiphanic visions that take us from a nineteenth-century London pub to a reworking of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, Marcel uses his gift of the creative imagination to break the eternal spiral of new beginnings, and to thumb his nose at despair and resignation.AKAKPresented here, side by side, is Tremblay's fictionalized account of the death of his own mother, so lovingly enacted in his new play, For The Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. In what becomes a coda to his great Chronicles of the Plateau Mont-Royal cycle of novels, Tremblay creates, with grace and tenderness, a redemption and transcendent grandeur for these familiar and beloved characters: A Thing of Beauty.AKAKOther novels in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal series:AKAKThe Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant AKThe First Quarter of the Moon AKThe Duchess and the Commoner AKNews from Edouard AKThÈrËse and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel AKAKAK--------------------------------------------------------------------------------AKAKAKISBN 0-88922-390-4; $18.95 Canada / $14.95 U.S.A.AK©1998; 224 pp; 1st printingAKAKAKAK--------------------------------------------------------------------------------AKAKAKAt the end of Tremblay's career one will likely be able to sew together all his plays and novels and discover that we have been privileged to read the works of a veritable QuÈbÈcois Marcel Proust.AKóCanadian Book Review AnnualAKAKAKAK--------------------------------------------------------------------------------AKAKAKTo order TalonbooksTremblay, Michel is the author of 'Thing of Beauty', published 1998 under ISBN 9780889223905 and ISBN 0889223904.