Book Description
This novel marks the completion of Tremblay's Chronicles of the Pateau Mont-Royal.

Language Notes
Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French

About the Author
Michel Tremblay's singular contribution to international culture and literature has been recognized throughout the world. He is the recipient of eight cultural and literary awards in France, including the Chevalier of Arts and Letters in 1984, and Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters of France in 1991; twenty-one awards in Canada; one each in Italy, Belgium and Scotland; and winner of the award for Long-Standing Public Service at the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay Festival in 1989. Recently he became the recipient of the 1994 Molson Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. Of his own work, Michel Tremblay has said: "I know what I want in the theatre. I want a real political theatre, but I know that political theatre is dull. I write fables." Available from Talonbooks (plays): Albertine in Five Times (1986) Les Belles Soeurs (Revised) (1992) Bonjour, Là, Bonjour (1990) Damnée Manon, Sacrée Sandra (1981) La Duchesse de Langeais & Other Plays (1976) En Pièces Détachées (1975) For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again (1998) Forever Yours, Marie-Lou (Revised) (1994) Hosanna (Revised) (1991) The Impromptu of Outrement (1981) Impromptu on Nuns' Island (2002) La Maison Suspendue (1991) Marcel Pursued by the Hounds (1996) The Real World? (1988) Remember Me (1984) Sainte-Carmen of the Main (1981) He also appears in Modern Canadian Plays Volume I (2000) (novels): The Fat Woman Next Door is Pregnant (1981) Thérèse and Pierette and the Little Hanging Angel (1996) The Duchess and the Commoner (1999) News From Edouard (2000) The First Quarter of the Moon (1994) A Thing of Beauty (1998) The Heart Laid Bare (Making Room) (2002) (memoirs): Bambi and Me (1997) Twelve Opening Acts (2002) LISTPRICE: 15.95

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Edouard, whom we met in The Duchess and the Commoner, a common shoe salesman at the feet of the well-heeled by day; but the "Duchess of Langeais," star of the transvestite shows on the Main by night, has been left an inheritance from his mother, Victoire. With this money, he sails on the ocean-liner Liberte to Paris, an idealized, glorious foreign place, the art, culture and architecture of which he imagines will be familiar to him from the books and movies he has read and seen. But when he arrives in Paris, his constant encounters with the realities of the primitive and inconvenient aspects of daily life in Europe bring him face to face with the recognition that France is not exclusively the liberating, glorious place he imagined it to be. The divine Paris, it turns out, does indeed have feet of clay. All of this he records in a diary, which he will send to his sister-in-law, "the fat woman." Will Edouard survive the disillusionment of both his journey to the imperial centre, and his return to what he previously considered the dull and dreary reality of his life in Montreal? Of course, anyone at all familiar with Tremblay's characters through either his plays, in which these same characters all appear in a dramatized context, or with the already published translations in this series of novels, can guess at the answer. But nothing, absolutely nothing can equal Tremblay's telling of this story in his own fascinating and absorbing way.

Edouard is one of Michel Tremblay's most complex and colourful characters. In this novel, the fourth in the Chronicles of the Plateau Mont Royal and the last of the series to be translated into English, he occupies centre stage for the delight and edification of readers everywhere.