“Ann of England”, by Julia Deck, Seuil, 256 p., €20, digital €15.
It all starts with a bad feeling that doesn’t say its name. “We either think about it or we don’t. I’ve been thinking about it for thirty years.”Julia Deck confesses in the first line of her new book, in a tone that we do not know, written in an autobiographical text, while her five previous books, published by Editions de Minuit (including Viviane Elisabeth Fauville, Private property AND National monument2012, 2019 and 2022), were all fiction: caustic, funny and inventive.
Before even knowing the subject of this book (including the title, Anne of Englandmight divert the reader from a historical novel), we assume that something serious has happened in the author’s life.
The event that gave rise to this radical literary bifurcation is a ” disaster “ Coming to Julia Deck in April 2022. While visiting Ann, her 84-year-old mother, in her Parisian apartment, she discovers her lifeless body in the bathroom. Victim of a stroke, this woman spent twenty-eight hours alone, “lying on tiles”In the emergency room the medical diagnosis is clear: cerebral hemorrhage, paralysis on the right side. He is told that “The brain will gradually drown in blood, swelling inside the skull until it causes death.”
Two alternate stories
Such a drama brings back very old memories and blocks any projection into the future. As a writer, Julia Deck decided to confront these upheavals in order to find a way to connect them, starting from two alternating stories that resonate from one end of the book to the other.
The story is told for the first time in the present, a terrain mined by shock. From the first moment, Julia Deck understands that this catastrophe happened to her mother, “by domino”It also became his. “It is normal for mothers and daughters chained by a steel rope.” Sticking strictly to the facts, the author, who is also involved in this drama, describes her mother’s hospital journey, transported from one department to another: emergency room, acute medicine, follow-up care in her room. “It looks like a tomb.” The hospital seen by Deck is a parallel world where the inmates “managing the flow” and do “turning the beds”. Although the patient’s life prognosis is not in danger, some of the consequences seem irreparable: the writer’s mother is losing her memory of words.
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