Abstract

Catherine Mavrikakis's Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques , published in Spring of 2000, is a fascinating first novel by this professor of French literature. The 'story', which comprises a series of anecdotes, hovers between fiction and autobiography, though the reader is never sure where one ends and the other begins. Mavrikakis's subject matter--death and mourning--is an extension of her previous academic work, particularly her study of the renowned French author, Hervé Guibert, who wrote a trilogy of novels based on his personal battle with AIDS. Critics responded favourably to Mavrikakis's new work, praising the superior quality of the author's writing, the sardonic humour she maintains in the face of all the dying, and her interesting use of cultural allusions that demand of both reader and translator a familiarity with intellectual and popular icons. The preface of this thesis places Mavrikakis's new work within the context of new and established literary genres: thanatological writing, elegy and plague fiction, and AIDS-infected literature, and specifically, Hervé Guibert's novels, which Mavrikakis imitates in a curiously anthropophagic way. The final section of the preface examines the difficulties and challenges met during the translation process, such as a shifting level of language and a mercurial narratorial voice. The bulk of the thesis is the English translation of the first half of this remarkable book, newly titled A Feast of Lamentations . Also included are two excerpts from the second half of the novel, which have special significance to the thrust of Mavrikakis's fiction.