Antonine Maillet
Autor von Pélagie: The Return to Acadie
Über den Autor
Bildnachweis: (c) Harry Palmer, National Archives of Canada: PA-182393
Werke von Antonine Maillet
Don l'original 1 Exemplar
Les Drôlatiques, horrifiques et épouvantables aventures de Panurge, ami de Pantagruel : d'apres Rabelais (1983) 1 Exemplar
le livre inachevé 1 Exemplar
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- 1929-05-10
- Geschlecht
- female
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- Canada
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- Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada
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- Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Canada
Montréal, Québec, Canada - Preise und Auszeichnungen
- National Order of Québec (Officer)
Lorne Pierce Medal (1980)
Order of Canada
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Others found their way back to Canada "by the back door", and it's this return from exile, the foundation of the present-day French-speaking communities in places like New Brunswick, that Maillet documents in her famous novel, which won her the Prix Goncourt in 1979.
The Acadian widow Pélagie has worked for fifteen years in Georgia to earn the money she needs to buy a cart and a team of oxen to take her family back to the North. They face endless difficulties during what turns into a ten-year journey, picking up numerous other exiled Acadians as they go, and Pélagie becomes a kind of Moses leading her people to the promised land.
Maillet gives the story a deliberately epic quality, rooted in an oral tradition, by reporting it to us as told around the hearth by people three generations after Pélagie and her companions, traditional storytellers who are Maillet's own direct ancestors. Pélagie's companions are straight out of the quest-story tradition: the wise old storyteller, the traditional healer/midwife, the intrepid young hero, the fey young girl, the (ghostly?) sea captain who turns up in moments of crisis, the giant (Rabelais is constantly hovering around in the background, not surprising given that many of the Acadians came from Poitou in the early 17th century), etc. But they are never just stock types: in their truculent arguments and witty dialogue, they come over as fresh and very individual, as does Pélagie with her mix of spiritual leader, Mother Courage and all-too-human middle-aged woman.
All the dialogue is in Acadian dialect, with the third-person narration in slightly more standard French, but still making extensive use of local words. It's intelligible with some lateral thinking, particularly if you've read Rabelais, but it's a bit of a shock at first. It took me a while to work out that Acadians use "je" for the first person plural pronoun as well as for the singular, for instance. And the dialect is clearly a large part of the book's character and one of the reasons for its obvious classic status in Canada. Quite a tour-de-force, anyway!… (mehr)