After more than a decade [Marie-Claire Blais] has at last recaptured in Le Sourd dans la ville the ring of profound human truth so intensely present in Une Saison dans la vie d'Emmanuel, to which this novel will surely be often compared. The run-on syntax with which she flirted somewhat awkwardly in Les Nuits de l'Underground is mastered here, with stunning results. In one long paragraph containing no more than perhaps three dozen full stops, Blais brings to life—and then to death—the inhabitants of the gloomy little Montreal hotel that serves as the novel's setting. Like voices in a fugue or threads in a well-made tapestry, their lives weave in and out through each other to form a harmonious (though depressing) whole.

The bond linking all these individuals is pain—physical, psychological, spiritual. There is Florence Gray, a jilted wife contemplating suicide, trying to achieve the...