Speaking through the Night: Diary of a Lockdown, MarchApril 2020

(Paperback)

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Isolated in Nogent-sur-Marne, Wajdi Mouawad embarks upon a spectacular inner voyage, travelling from his own microcosm to the colossal eye of the Big Bang, where dead stars shine. We follow him from Peter Handkes office to his fathers retirement home, to the banks of the Saint Lawrence, to Montral, Greece, Greenland, and the Lebanon of his childhood. Through Kafka and Star Wars, by way of French phonetics and the Temple of Apollo in Delphi, he explores the razors edge of madness, conjures a dream shared by all members of the human tribe, and probes the bestiality of our everyday lives.

Mouawads plays, novels, and essays speak to us all, confronting our ghosts, addressing the obscure and the impenetrable and the lack of vision, which dissipate as they are put into words. During the nights of lockdown in the spring of 2020, gazing into the murky depths, braving the vertiginous mystery of the universe, writing these chronicles will have allowed him to stir the inky darkness of pandemic blindness and release a consoling light.

Author Bio

Over the past twenty years, Wajdi Mouawad has risen to fame in Canada and internationally, acclaimed for the power of his writing and the originality of his vision as a theatre director. He is the author of an epic quartet for the stage, The Blood of Promises (Tideline, Scorched, Forests, Heavens), and two novels, Visage retrouv and Anima, which won numerous prizes. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages, and his plays have been produced around the world. In 2016, he was named artistic director of La Colline - Thtre national in Paris.