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.
"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
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, and is one of Quebec’s most-produced and translated playwrights (his plays have been translated into twelve languages).
Born in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, Sheila Fischman was raised in Ontario and is a graduate of the University of Toronto. She is a founding member of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada and has also been a columnist for the Globe and Mail and Montreal Gazette, a broadcaster with CBC Radio, and literary editor of the Montreal Star. She now devotes herself full time to literary translation, specializing in contemporary Quebec fiction, and has translated more than 125 Quebec novels by, among others, Michel Tremblay, Jacques Poulin, Anne Hébert, François Gravel, Marie-Claire Blais, and Roch Carrier.
…the ordinary into the extraordinary. 6. Impurity by Larry Tremblay and translated by Sheila … Fischman Impurity begins with the disappearance of bestselling … tour de force, structured like a matryoshka doll, Impurity weaves a complex web of interlocking narratives …
…An excerpt from Larry Tremblay’s Impurity , translated by Sheila Fischman, has been …
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