THE DAY IS DARK and THREE TRAVELERS

by Marie Claire Blais ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 1967

These two novellas are some of the young Canadian writer's earliest work, presumably predating Mad Shadow (Little; Brown-1960) and lacking the dramatic values of that short book while matching its mood of disconsolate, passionate lyricism. ""Illusions fall like dead leaves to the ground"" in both of these febrile, misty vagaries of love and loss; in the former the ritual repeats itself through the cyclical sequences involving first a mother, then a daughter; here the ""dreamy-eyed little girls of yesterday have been transformed into grown girls and young women bereft of freshness."" In the second story, more experimental in technique, a love affair disrupts and eventually destroys a young musician and his Wife....Both are told in a tone of heightened sensibility-sentimentality(?) which the French language makes more permissible and neither, although suggesting Mlle. Blais' talent, really indicates the direction it would take so much more realistically, so much more effectively in A Season in the Life of Emmanuel.

Pub Date: April 21, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1967

Categories: FICTION