[In Nights in the Underground, Marie-Claire Blais has written] a quiet and poignant account of her heroine Geneviève's love for two women….

There are no fireworks here, none of the violent imagery and events that colour her most famous novels…. The experiment here, and it's a courageous experiment, is simply to write as well as she can of the joys and sufferings of love between women. Some self-indulgence aside, she succeeds to a remarkable extent. She uses the brashness and humour of the talk in the bar to offset the intensity of feeling in Geneviève's affair with Lali, and then shifts into the new style of writing so that the scenes in Paris and then back in Montreal … are simply and gently expressive. (p. 29)

Linda Leith, "Rights of Memory," in The Canadian Forum, Vol. 59, No. 692, September, 1979, pp. 28-9.∗