SOURCE: "Michel Tremblay: An Interweave of Prose and Drama," translated by Richard Deshaies, in Yale French Studies, No. 65, 1983, pp. 106-23.

In the following essay, Gobin elucidates the relationship between the plays and the novels in the series "Le Cycle des Belles-soeurs" and "Les Chroniques du Plateau Mont-Royal," stressing that "it is only by coming to know the plays that one can have an idea of what is being woven in the novels."

Although still young—he was born in 1942—the Montréalais writer Michel Tremblay has already produced a considerable amount of work: a dozen or more original plays have been staged; four novels, a work of science fiction, and a collection of short stories have been published; he has also translated into French four contemporary American plays, produced an adaptation of Aristophanes's Lysistrata (1969), and coproduced a movie, Il était une fois dans l'Est (1974), with André Brassard, his...