Impurity

Description

A playful and macabre narrative tour de force, structured like a matryoshka doll, Impurity weaves a complex web of interlocking narratives in multiple voices and a variety of forms. The bestselling author Alice Livingston is dead, leaving her philosopher husband, Antoine, dealing with a legacy towards which he has felt increasingly estranged. Confronted with his wife's much reported disappearance, Antoine revisits their past relationship: open and liberated on the outside, but constrained and even deviant on the inside. The news of the day (the death of JFK Junior, the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, etc.) announced by the television running in the novel's background gradually becomes significant in the lives of the protagonists - as revealed in Alice's last book. As narrators of the novel become less and less reliable, good intentions become corrupted, appearances prove to be deceiving, and Impurity's multiple plots come to a gripping, asphyxiating conclusion.

Larry Tremblay is a writer, director, actor, and specialist in Kathakali, an elaborate dance theatre form which he has studied on numerous trips to India. He has published twenty books as a playwright, poet, novelist, and essayist. Thanks to an uninterrupted succession of new plays (Anatomy Lesson, Ogre, The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi, Les Mains bleues, Teleroman, among others) in production during the 1990s, Tremblay's work continues to achieve international recognition. One of Quebec's most versatile writers, Tremblay currently teaches acting at l'Ecole superieure de theatre de l'Universite du Quebec a Montreal.

"I thoroughly enjoyed the interlocking layers of this book. Entertaining and complex, Impurity invites a second reading between the lines." -Patricia Sandberg, miramichireader.com "[S]traightforward, almost stark, an effective contrast to the emotionally heavy material" -Montreal Review of Books "A page-turner ... suspenseful and readable from start to finish."-Montreal Review of Books ~||~ "I thoroughly enjoyed the interlocking layers of this book. Entertaining and complex, Impurity invites a second reading between the lines."-Miramichi Reader ~||~ "A tightly nested narrative ... Tremblay offers an incredibly rich character study ... [he] plays with philosophy, with time, with authorship, with language and names, and with a host of representational, structural, and post-structural features ... The story pulls us forward through a series of crises, each building to the next and bringing us to the brink of empathy."-Rain Taxi ~||~