“Book Descriptions: A twenty-five-year-old woman named Suzanne wakes up one morning determined not to get out of bed. Her head is filled with trivia and despair. She feels trapped by her bourgeois, normal life, by her steady, pipe-smoking husband Pierre, and by her two children, Gisele and Paulo. Futile memories and desires flood her. She is wracked by inaction and a terrifying wish to sew herself up in her sheet like a corpse. She is repulsed by her own bod, her existence; she torments herself with feelings of rage and guilt toward her husband and children. Everything is too much for her and yet her mind will not stop working - she cannot shut off her memories or the knowledge that something terrible seems to be happening to her.
Writing in the first person, Janine Brégeon animates, with extraordinary accuracy and subtlety, the fragility of a mind on the verge of collapse. She deftly draws the reader into Suzanne's useless day, and vividly reveals her degrading and grandiose imaginings. "As a result of being taken for an idiot I'll never get up again. I'll get thin, I'll wither, I'll become a fossil or a sea-horse, who knows what, and the children will put me on a shelf and show me to people and they'll say: 'That's Mama.'" She daydreams through the afternoon and fantasizes earthquakes and floods in which she might prove herself a heroine. She exhausts herself with self-hatred, but the day finally ends and she stands on the balcony, quiet in the clear moonlight.
With great purity of style, Janine Brégeon has explored, through one woman, the depths of isolation that exist in all of us and threaten us each day.
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