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The fourth and most acclaimed of Desjardins' novels creates a sensual and exotic world combining history, magic, and the bizarre.
Table des matières
Cautionary Note to the Reader
I. STIGMA DIABOLICUM
II. FLAGELLUM FASCINORUM
III. LARVAE INFERNALES
IV. INCENSUM NEFARIUM
V. OCULUS MALIGNUS
VI. CORONA SUPPLICIORUM
VII. OLEATUM PANDAEMONIUM
VIII. OSCULUM INFAME
A propos de l'auteur
Martine Desjardins was born in the Town of Mount Royal, Québec, in 1957. The second child of six, she started writing short stories when she was seventeen. After receiving a bachelor's degree in Russian and Italian studies at the Université de Montréal, she went on to complete a master's degree in comparative literature, exploring humour in Dostoevsky's
The Devils. She worked as an assistant editor-in-chief at ELLE Québec magazine for four years before leaving to devote herself to writing. Her first novel,
Le cercle de Clara, was published by Leméac in 1997, and was nominated for both the Prix littéraires du Québec and the Grand Prix des lectrices de ELLE Québec in 1998. Talonbooks has published six translations of her more recent novels, including
Maleficium, a tour de force short-listed for the 2010 Governor General's Literary Award for French Fiction and Québec Prix des libraires. In her free time, Desjardins paints miniature models of ruins overgrown with vegetation.
Résumé
Martine Desjardins delivers to readers of Maleficium the unexpurgated revelations of Vicar Jerome Savoie, a heretic priest in nineteenth-century Montreal. Braving threats from the Catholic Church, Savoie violates the sanctity of the confessional in a confession-within-a-confession, in which seven penitents, each afficted with a debilitating malady or struck with a crippling deformity, relates his encounter with an enigmatic young woman whose lips bear a striking scar.
As these men penetrate deep into the exotic Orient, each falls victim to his own secret vice. One treks through Ethiopia in search of wingless locusts. Another hunts for fly-whisks among the clove plantations of Zanzibar. Yet others bargain for saffron in a Srinagar bazaar, search for the rarest frankincense, and pursue the coveted hawksbill turtle in the Sea of Oman. Two more seek the formula for sabon Nablus in Palestine or haggle over Persian carpets in the royal gardens of Shiraz. The men’s individual forms of punishment, revealed through the agency of the young woman, are wrought upon their bodies.
