It is hard, humbly recognizes Delphine de Vigan, to a novel about family life, about his mother. This last, confess the front pages, was given the death seventy-one year, and was found by his daughter, after five days in his apartment.
Difficult to treat an intimate subject, which is general enough to be of interest, personal enough to be sincere, authentic enough to allow its author to actually sublimate the shock of that death, which somewhere, it will not be spared this terrible encounter with the other face of the loved one's corpse.
It is a book that we approach with some hesitation which is primarily that of the author.
Throughout, the author interposed intermediate chapters, or she returns to his difficulties in dealing with a knot so tight, if present, and that it must resolve, despite the fear of being wrong, to romanticize, to disappoint or betraying his family, the survivors ...
But no doubt, it is a moving book that evokes the flaw that exists in each one in its own way. Each family behind his familiar ghosts, and the painful and necessary sociability that sustains human family rather than alone, like the fable of the porcupine of Schopenhauer, still wanting to be closer to his fellow fight against coldness of this world, but still hurt, a myth of Sisyphus sociable man.
Lucile Poirier see the day in a family of nine children. She grew up in noise, rowdiness, companionship, brotherhood, fear, into a family which will lose as a strange curse three of his son, and will have a last boy with Down syndrome. For a terrible fate animates every page. Maybe even do plongerions we not much in it if we do not feel them as terribly true.
After the accidental death of a young brother, the family is between precariousness and abundance, between pregnancies renewed Liane, mother, and professional achievements of George's father. Liane is a total mother, made to give birth to babies and take care of his house. Conditioned to turn its focus to obsession and blindness. Georges is a man before being a father. He loves women and girls. It is a more enigmatic character, the reserve and certainly unable to solve the mystery prevent the author to understand fully (Lucile wrote that she was raped by him "in his sleep," but as it is to use in the family that does not speak really no scandal breaks out, and Lucile will not be heard, taking with it the memory of what could happen).
After the suicide of two of his brothers, the reason for Lucile begins to waver. Bipolar diagnosed as the sister of his mother (repetition is a strong theme of the book, although it is not detailed, the book is deliberately not psychoanalysand).
For his two daughters, a combat against life madness and precariousness agrees.
This book is tricky. It is modest and respectful, honest and dignified.
Through writing, Delphine de Vigan tries to reconcile with the one that has left a very painful goodbye. The writing appears as a way to tame a dark past, interspersed with a dark family history, but that darkness in many ways all-powerful, the author tries to make a light, and referring to the artist Black par excellence, Pierre Soulages she says: "My instrument was no longer black, but this secret light from dark."
Nothing stands in the night, is reconciliation with the share of darkness in itself, it must be accepted, not to fall into the dichotomy. It is the novel of reconciliation in doubt, in the dark, ataraxia of one who agrees that nothing can oppose the dark.
Emma Breton
