Witnessing the mental and physical degradation of someone you love, someone who is part of your life, who gave you life, is a traumatic experience. You are out of words and the feelings don´t leave place to the intellect to process.
Annie Ernaux´s mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer´s at the beginning of the 1980s and died two years and a half later. After each visit, she made entries about her feelings, how her mother changed from a day to another, her constantly changing room companions. Like in the case of her other books I´ve read until now, her writing is a minutious seismographic account of facts and feelings. This time, it goes deep into the darkness of a sickness that takes you away not only your dignity, but your own life as well.
Je ne suis pas sortie de la nuit - translated as I Remain in Darkness - are her mother´s last articulated words she could remember. Shortly after, she will swimm deep into the troubled waters of amnesia. Reduced to an unrecognizable shadow of her true self, Ernaux identifies her own childhood´s helpless gestures into her mother.
It is a sad yet realistic depiction of coming at terms with the vulnerabilities and death of a parent. A parent who used to hold our hand and clean us and guide our first unsteady steps.
As her other novels, the book is short, reduced to essentials yet raising complex questions without answers. A philosophical journey through human misery and inquiry.
Rating: 4 stars
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