A Series Interrupted

At first glance, Augustino ou l’illumination (Augustino or illumination) is a melancholy finale to Marie-Claire Blais’s oeuvre. The slim volume contains seventy pages left behind by the Quebec writer, who died suddenly on November 30, 2021. Yet, even in fragmentary form, the text testifies to the fact that Blais’s career was never going to wrap up neatly. She would not have stopped writing while still alive.

Blais roared onto the literary scene in 1959, when she published the gothic fable La belle bête (published in English as Mad Shadows) at the age of twenty. More than two dozen novels followed over the next sixty years, in addition to works of poetry, drama, and non-fiction. Her accolades include the Prix Médicis and four Governor General’s awards. In such a career, it is hard to identify a crowning achievement, but Blais’s most read novel likely...