Les belles-soeurs

Few writers are fortunate enough to begin their careers with a work as resoundingly significant as Michel Tremblay's play Les Belles Soeurs. He wrote the play in 1965 but took three years to arrange a public performance. Its first production, however, was hugely successful and controversial, permanently changing theatre in Quebec. The play may be the province's most famous literary export. Les Belles Soeurs is based on a simple premise: Germaine Lauzon, a poor Québécoise woman, wins a million trading stamps in a lottery. To redeem them Germaine must glue them into the provided booklets, so she keeps her daughter home and invites her friends and relatives to join her in a "stamp party." The vitriol begins within seconds: the women bicker, steal the stamps, and recite their deprivations in a wild cacophony that is both hysterically funny and pitiably bleak. John Van Burek and Bill Glassco have made an admirable attempt at translating Les Belles Soeurs, but this is ultimately an untranslatable play. Tremblay was among the first Quebec authors to incorporate the Québécois dialect known as joual into literary writing, and there is no useful equivalent in Canadian English idiom for the dialect's inflections and expressions. Nevertheless, the translation is an uproarious and affecting work in its own right--a testament to the power of the original. Tremblay has gone on to create a diverse and impressive oeuvre, from his Plateau Mont-Royal chronicles (beginning with The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant) to the surreal horrors of Stories for Late Night Drinkers, but Les Belles Soeurs may well continue to be his most important work. --Jack Illingworth