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Marie-Claire Blais. Soifs. Paris. Seuil. 1996. 271 pages. 110 F. ISBN 2-02-029190-8.
Marie-Claire Blais's novel Soil, first published in Montreal in 1995, follows in the wake of her two prizewinning works Une saison dans la vie d Emmanuel and Les manuscrits de Pauline Archange: Visions dAnna, but never before now has Blais been riding on the crest of so high a wave. The epigraph from Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves provides Soifs with both its tone and structure, as it ebbs in and out of the individual psyches in streamof-consciousness fashion, dammed up by the one and only period in the book. The characters' sea-change is matched by the blurry Caribbean location, "an insular country," between Jamaica and Key West, where the Quebecois...