Rite of Passage

Description

At the crossroads that lead to the end of childhood, Nana faces the hectic passage of her adolescence and the new responsibilities that fall on her shoulders when her grandmother Josephine approaches death. To calm the storm, Nana continues reading the stories of Josaphat-the-Violin: following three of Josaphat's fantastic tales, revelations whose full scope in her own existence she cannot measure yet await her. In parallel, Nana's rebellious mother Maria, back in Montreal, languishes, torn between her desire to gather her young family around her and the deep uncertainty she has of being able to take care of them properly. Always in search of what's "best" and what's "elsewhere," will she seize the "opportunity" of which the Americans speak, "which only hits the door of life once"? However, the most difficult passage is that of time, inexorable, which literally breaks everything in its path: the feelings and souls it binds and unbinds sometimes for the better, and too often for the worse.

Born in a working-class family in Quebec, novelist and playwright Michel Tremblay was raised in Montreal's Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood. An ardent reader from a young age, Tremblay began to write, in hiding, as a teenager. One of the most produced and most prominent playwrights in the history of Canadian theatre, Tremblay has received countless prestigious honours and accolades. Because of their charismatic originality, their vibrant character portrayals, and the profound vision they embody, Tremblay's dramatic, literary and autobiographical works have long enjoyed remarkable international popularity; his plays have been adapted and translated into dozens of languages and have achieved huge success in Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East. Of his own work, 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. Tremblay's novel The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant was long-listed for the CBC Canada Reads program in both 2002 and 2003. In April 2006 - as Montreal concluded its term as World Book Capital - Tremblay was the recipient of the Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, awarded annually in recognition of a lifetime of literary achievement to a writer of international stature and accomplishment.