A Great Consolation: Survive! Survive! & Misery's Progress

(Paperback)

Publishing Details

Classifications

Physical Properties

Description

Survive! Survive!transports readers to September 1935, to glorious, tragic times in the colourful company of Ti-Lou and the Duchess douard, whose sparkling exchanges hide indissoluble pain; to sombre, twilight times with Victoire and Tlesphore 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 lifes 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 Miserys Progress, 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 douard, as well as with Albertine, her husband Paul, and their children, Thrse and baby Marcel. Outside this unbearably crowded household, war rages and rationing deprives everyone of basic necessities.

These characters dont 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

Author Bio

Sheila Fischman has received numerous honours, including the 1998 Governor Generals Award (for her translation of Michel Tremblays 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 Flix-Antoine Savard Awards from Columbia University. In 2000, she was invested into the Order of Canada and, in 2008, into the Ordre national du Qubec, 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 Montral.