42. I Remain In Darkness | Annie Ernaux
translated by Tanya Leslie
There is a word in Portuguese that means to have a relationship with a writer or artist we may never meet, to feel a sense of friendship, a longing. Moledro.
I’ve felt this with all of Annie Ernaux’s books.
I loved this book for two reasons, her endorsement from another of my favourite authors, Deborah Levy:
‘One of the best books you’ll ever read.’
— Deborah Levy, author of Hot Milk\
And the second, because she writes about her experience watching her mother gradually decline with Alzheimer’s disease which is something I have experienced too. There is something particularly devastating about daughters losing mothers (mine at the age of 26) to a disease like Alzheimer’s. Watching someone you love forget who you are before they’ve died has it’s own separate category of grief.
Ernaux is known for her ‘diary-like’ writing style and her books are always short (around 100 pages) written in a direct, declarative style that she has called “l’écriture plate”: “flat writing.” I’ve never come across an author that writes this way before and I absolutely love it.
The book takes us through her mother’s decline and Ernaux’s frustration as her daughter to now have to parent someone she no longer recognises or recognises her.
PS: I was drawn to the Fitzcarraldo Edition books a year ago because their brand blue is very similar to the one I have for my little side business.
Fitzcarraldo Editions is an independent publisher specialising in contemporary fiction and long-form essays. They publish Nobel Prize in Literature laureates (such as Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk and Annie Ernaux) and they brought my favourite book of 2022 into my life 🫶🏻
Their books are paperback with French flaps which I LOVE because they make me feel fancy :)
”I remain in darkness” was the last sentence my mother wrote.
I often dream of her, picturing her the way she was before her illness. She is alive and yet she has been dead. When I wake up, for a few moments I am certain that she is still living in this dual form, at once dead and alive, like those characters in Greek mythology whose souls have been ferried twice across the River Styx.”