It’s brutal. The gap is gone, the nappies are full of crap that the daughter can’t bear to wash away. Annie Ernaux bitterly describes her mother’s journey into dementia. It has become an honest book about disgust, love, despair and grief. Life as literature The French Nobel Prize winner has created his own literary genre with books that unfold in the borderland between autobiography and sociology. By looking at her own experiences with a magnifying glass, she shows that personal experiences can also be universal. MET THE KING: Annie Ernaux received the Nobel Prize in Literature for 2022 from Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf. Photo: JONATHAN NACKSTRAND / AFP In the latest book in Norwegian, which came out already in 1997 in France, she is more private than she usually is. These are diary notes she wrote during her mother’s last two years of life, after her mother developed dementia and ended her days in a nursing home. The title, “I’m still here in the dark,” was the last sentence the mother wrote. Her days alternated between confusion and lucidity. At times she could glimpse sentences as sharp as broken glass: Problematic genre In the book’s introductory chapter, Annie Ernaux says that the notes were never intended for publication. Nevertheless, she advocates that the private notes deserve the public light. They can stand as a counterpart to the portrait of her mother that she drew in the book “A woman”, which appeared ten years earlier. There she tried to get closer to her mother, to whom she was so attached as a child, but to whom she became a stranger when she herself received a higher education and embarked on a class journey away from her original environment. I believe it is a far stronger release than this book. “A woman” is a thoroughly edited piece of text that also devotes space to the author’s thoughts about writing a life. “I’m still here in the dark”, on the other hand, is unpolished. It appears more immediate, but at the same time is in danger of becoming repetitive and self-centered. The short paragraphs say more about Ernaux than about the dying mother. There is a challenge with the genre; the diary is directed inwards, towards the writer, and not towards an outside recipient. But then the choice to publish this raw material is part of Annie Ernaux’s big project, namely to write about the most immediate with different angles and never to shield oneself from the doomsday Henrik Ibsen thought every writer must keep over himself. PARTS FROM THE DIARIES: Annie Ernaux is more private than usual when she writes about her mother’s dementia in “I am still here in the dark”. Photo: JOHANNA GERON / Reuters Direct report from the nursing home The diary, which has been finely translated by the regular Ernaux translator Henninge Margrethe Solberg, reveals unfiltered reports from a life in decay. At home, the old people urinate on the floor, they talk over themselves, some scream, others frantically look for objects they can’t find – and which don’t exist. The mother is alternately happy to see her daughter, alternately dismissive and abrupt. Ernaux experiences decay as animalistic. She shaves her old mother and combs her hair to bring out the human again. She also acknowledges the impossibility of her now becoming a mother to her own mother: In the light of the media What is it that makes everyone talk about dementia right now? No sooner has Ingebrigt Steen Jensen written a book about her own encounter with the disease, than the documentary series “Dementia Choir” here on news touches people around the country and inspires similar local choirs in rural and urban areas. The openness about a disease that affects 100,000 Norwegians is welcome. But it makes me wonder: Is it the zeitgeist that makes the publisher choose to publish this particular Ernaux book now? Could it be equally interesting to publish some of the books she has written about her own writing, such as “Écrire la vie” (2011) or “Écrire comme un couteau” (2003)? Norwegian poems hit The depressing descriptions of everyday life are painful to read. The unpleasant thing repeats itself, week after week, where both the mother and fellow patients weaken day by day. Nevertheless, there is something a little distanced in the daughter’s gaze, since she primarily writes about her own pain in the face of her mother’s challenges. For me, the small Norwegian poetry collection “How did you know I was here?” stronger impression. The book, which came out last autumn, is a lovely collaboration between author Åse Ombustvedt and illustrator Øyvind Torseter. Ombustvedt goes closer into the old man’s imaginary world and experiences the days through her. They are challenging, but also filled with memories that give the dementia patient a parallel life. With Ombustvedt and Torseter, not everything becomes disgusting or sad, even if control over life slips away. Furious about the grief Annie Ernaux herself says that she writes to understand, but most of all to preserve. In this book, the analyzes give way to an all-consuming, personal grief. She also describes it like this, in the diary from her mother’s last year: news reviewer Photo: Gyldendal / gnf Title: I am still here in the dark Author: Annie Ernaux Translator: Henninge Margethe Solberg Genre: Diary Publisher: Gyldendal Pages: 103 Published: February 2023
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“I’m still here in the dark” by Annie Ernaux – news Culture and entertainment
