{"title":"Chronicles Of The Plateau Mont Royal","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"fat-woman-next-door-is-pregnant-book-michel-tremblay-9780889221901","title":"The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant","description":"\u003cp\u003eIt is the glorious second day of May, 1942. The sun is drawing the damp from earth still heavy with the end of a long Quebec winter, the budding branches of the trees along rue Fabre and in Parc Lafontaine of the Plateau-Mont-Royal ache to release their leaves into the warm, clear air heralding the approach of summer.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSeven women in this raucous Francophone working-class Montreal neighbourhood are pregnant--only one of them, \"the fat woman,\" is bearing a child of true love and affection. Next door to the home that is by times refuge, asylum, circus-arena, confessional and battleground to her extended family, with ancient roots in both rural Quebec and the primordial land of the Saskatchewan Cree, stands an immaculately kept but seemingly empty house where the fates, Rose, Mauve, Violet and their mother Florence, only ever fleetingly and uncertainly glimpsed by those in a state of emotional extremis, are knitting the booties of what will become the children of a whole new nation.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn this first of six novels that became his Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, Tremblay allows his imagination free reign, fictionalizing the lives of his beloved characters, dramatized so brilliantly in his plays and remembered so poignantly in his memoirs.\"The fat woman\" both is and is not Michel Tremblay's mother--her extended family and neighbours more than a symbol of a colonized people: abandoned and mocked by France; conquered and exploited by England; abused and terrorized by the Church; and forced into a war by Canada supporting the very powers that have crushed their spirit and twisted their souls since time immemorial. This is a \"divine comedy\" of the extraordinary triumphs and tragedies of ordinary people caught up by circumstances that span the range of the ridiculous to the sublime.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49651474989329,"sku":"GOR002475156","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49922631762193,"sku":"CIN0889221901G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51009070137617,"sku":"NIN9780889221901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51826854428945,"sku":"CIN0889221901VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52672219709713,"sku":"NLS9780889221901","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53356782616849,"sku":"GOR004895322","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0889221901.jpg?v=1751235164"},{"product_id":"duchess-and-the-commoner-book-michel-tremblay-9780889224186","title":"The Duchess and the Commoner","description":"\u003cp\u003e(This third volume in the Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal--an epic series of novels which imagines the lives of the characters of Tremblay's plays--deals with an explicitly gay thematic: Tremblay's metaphor for the Québécois desire for a more glamorous identity on the world stage.)\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis is the third volume in Michel Tremblay's six-volume Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal, an epic series of novels which imagines, in prose, the lives of the characters of Tremblay's plays, in which each of them acts out their own personal drama: their loves, their disappointments, their travails, their agony and their ecstasy. It is in the novels, however, that these characters are seen in their context of time and space: the neighbourhood in which Tremblay and his extended family lived and grew up.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe Duchess and the Commoner focuses on Albertine's brother, Édouard, brother-in-law to 'the fat woman' and uncle to Marcel, and to the 'fat woman's' son. In ths volume, Édouard launches his forays into the 1940's world of Montréal show-business and creates his own astonishing role within it. As with all the novels in this series, a certain sense of wonder, even magic, emanates from the grandmother, Victoire, which in this episode is seen flowing through Édouard to his nephew, the brilliant and disturbed Marcel.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50268671475985,"sku":"CIN0889224188VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52689041260817,"sku":"NLS9780889224186","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0889224188.jpg?v=1751298706"},{"product_id":"therese-and-pierrette-and-the-little-hanging-angel-book-michel-tremblay-9780889221987","title":"Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel","description":"Therese and Pierrette and the Little Hanging Angel is the second of five novels in Michel Tremblay's Plateau Mont-Royal series, an evocative, magical retelling of the author's own birth, childhood, and adolescence in a working class Montreal neighborhood of eccentrics, dreamers and imaginary characters of mythic proportions. Three schoolgirls, Therese 'n Pierrette and their friend Simone, are caught up in the dark mysteries of their rites of passage: innocence moving into experience; life into birth. Circling around their uncertainties are cold, merciless predators, ready to strike at the slightest sign of weakness - the vicious hypocrisy of the Church, the cruel ignorance of the petty bourgeoisie, and the burning lust of the child molester.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51102825840913,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51102827741457,"sku":"NIN9780889221987","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52690047664401,"sku":"NLS9780889221987","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0889221987.jpg?v=1750850825"},{"product_id":"thing-of-beauty-book-michel-tremblay-9780889223905","title":"A Thing of Beauty","description":"\u003cp\u003eMarch, 1963. Winter has launched its final assault on Montreal. The Fat Woman, Thérèse, Édouard, Pierrette, Marcel, all the star-crossed characters of Tremblay's Chronicles of Plateau-Mont-Royal are here again, 20 years later. Marcel, now 23, learns that his Auntie Nana--The Fat Woman who is here finally named--is gravely ill and her days are numbered. How will he, with his exaggerated sensitivity, his visions, his ongoing struggle with \"reality\" pit his fertile imagination against this inexorable march of death? In five epiphanic visions that take us from a nineteenth-century London pub to a reworking of Michelangelo's Last Judgement, Marcel uses his gift of the creative imagination to break the eternal spiral of new beginnings, and to thumb his nose at despair and resignation.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePresented here, side by side, is Tremblay's fictionalized account of the death of his own mother, so lovingly enacted in his new play, For the Pleasure of Seeing Her Again. In what becomes a coda to his great Chronicles of the Plateau-Mont-Royal cycle of novels, Tremblay creates, with grace and tenderness, a redemption and transcendent grandeur for these familiar and beloved characters: A Thing of Beauty.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52169566650641,"sku":"NIN9780889223905","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52671874695441,"sku":"NLS9780889223905","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889223905.jpg?v=1757679348"},{"product_id":"news-from-douard-book-michel-tremblay-9780889224353","title":"News from douard","description":"Édouard, whom we met in \u003ci\u003eThe Duchess and the Commoner\u003c\/i\u003e, a common shoe salesman at the feet of the well-heeled by day; but the \"Duchess of Langeais,\" star of the transvestite shows on the Main by night, has been left an inheritance by his mother, Victoire. With this money, he sails on the ocean-liner Liberté to Paris, an idealized, glorious foreign place, the art, culture and architecture of which he imagines will be familiar to him from the books and movies he has read and seen. But when he arrives in Paris, his constant encounters with the realities of the primitive and inconvenient aspects of daily life in Europe bring him face to face with the recognition that France is not exclusively the liberating, glorious place he had imagined it to be. The divine Paris, it turns out, does indeed have feet of clay. All of this he records in a diary, which he will send to his sister-in-law, \"the fat woman.\" Will Édouard survive the disillusionment of both his journey to the imperial centre, and his return to what he previously considered the dull and dreary reality of his life in Montréal?\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e While all of the six novels in this series recount the moving, hilarious, angry and exotic lives of the generation inhabiting the \"Plateau\" of Montréal just on the cusp of Québec's metamorphosis from the oppression of colonialism to a culture with its own identity and language, \u003ci\u003eNews from Édouard\u003c\/i\u003e, volume four in this six-part series of semi-autobiographical novels, is the most pointedly explicit at the level of Tremblay's sweeping metaphor of Québec's search for identity, dignity, pride and independence from both its French and its British (Canadian) colonial past.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52690311676177,"sku":"NLS9780889224353","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889224353.jpg?v=1762337359"},{"product_id":"first-quarter-of-the-moon-book-michel-tremblay-9780889223523","title":"The First Quarter of the Moon","description":"It is June 20, 1952, a decade after the events described in The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, the first volume of Michel Tremblay's series of autobiographical fiction. The mystic, yet palpable instant of summer's arrival is experienced simultaneously by the fat woman's son (who is never named) and Marcel. These moving, profoundly different epiphanies of a transforming world, seen through the memories of the characters, set the stage for the action of the novel which takes place in the space of this single, evocative day. The fat woman's son experiences this moment as an episode of profound personal objectification - he sees himself as in a photo of that larger, inclusive moment. Marcel, on the other hand, literally seizes the moment, and stores it in his school bag as a physical thing. It is also the day of final exams at the Ecole Saint-Stanislas where the fat woman's son, a boy who lives inside the books he loves, is in the gifted class, and his cousin Marcel, the mad family terror, is in the class for slow learners. Racked by envy at what he sees as Marcel's genius - his ability to create and function in another dimension of reality - the gifted child blanks out during the French exam. The first quarter of the moon - which rises over the final scenes of the novel in which the fat woman's son recognizes and acknowledges his cousin Marcel's genius - is an exquisitely crafted and resonant metaphor for the symbiotic relation between the imaginary and the real, the privileged educated elite and the great unwashed, innocence and experience, sanity and madness.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52690374557969,"sku":"NLS9780889223523","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780889223523.jpg?v=1762337491"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-gb\/collections\/chronicles-of-the-plateau-mont-royal-book-series.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}