Mad Shadows

Mad Shadows exploded upon the Quebec literary scene in 1959, when Marie-Claire Blais was only twenty years old. Acclaimed and reviled, this novel quickly established Blais as a formidable and revolutionary talent.
A harrowing pathology of the soul, Mad Shadows centres on a family group: Patrice, the beautiful and narcissistic son; his ugly and malicious sister, Isabelle-Marie; and Louise, their vain and uncomprehending mother. These characters inhabit an amoral universe where beauty reflects no truth and love is an empty delusion. Ultimately, Blais’s characters are annihilated by their own obsessions in a violent - indeed, gothic - denouement. With the closing passage of Mad Shadows, Marie-Claire Blais remorselessly clears the way for a new literature in Quebec.