The Obese Christ

Description

The asocial, sexually repressed Edgar, kneeling in grief at his mother's graveside, turns abruptly to witness a terrifying and life-altering event: the brutal rape of a young woman. Compelled by muddled instinct (and ingrained religious conviction), our hero bears the unconscious victim home, solemnly pledging to care for her and to act as her saviour. As winter closes in, the captor's neuroses are revealed and his behaviour becomes increasingly violent, allowing the victim only one escape. With The Obese Christ, Larry Tremblay squarely situates himself within the realm of Hitchcock, Polanski, and Stephen King. A brilliant exercise in unease and paranoia, The Obese Christ demonstrates Tremblay's powerful ability to evoke dead and fear, while immersing the reader in a wrapped and putrid world told from Edgar's sanctified point of view.

Larry Tremblay is a writer, director, actor, and specialist in Kathakali, an elaborate dance theater form which he has studied on numerous trips to India. He has published twenty books as a playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist. The recent publication of Talking Bodies (Talonbooks, 2001) brought together four of his plays in English translation. Thanks to an uninterrupted succession of new plays (Anatomy Lesson, Ogre, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, Les Mains bleues, Teleroman, among others), Tremblay's work continues to achieve international recognition. His plays, premiered for the most part in Montreal, have also been produced, often in translation, in Italy, France, Belgium, Mexico, Columbia, Brazil, Argentina, and Scotland. One of Quebec's most versatile writers, Tremblay currently teaches acting at l'Ecole superieure de theatre de l'Universite du Quebec a Montreal. Sheila Fischman is a member of the Order of Canada and has a doctorate from the University of Waterloo. In 1999, she received an honourary doctorate from the University of Ottawa. A two-time Governor General's Award winner, Fischman has translated from French to English more than one hundred novels by such prominent Quebec writers as Michel Tremblay, Jacques Poulin, Anne Hebert, Francois Gravel, Marie-Claire Blais and Roch Carrier. She is a founding member of the Literary Translators' Association of Canada and has also been a book columnist for the Globe and Mail and the Montreal Gazette. In 2008, Fischman was awarded the prestigious Molson Prize for her outstanding contributions to Canadian literature.