Cellule – Lou Marcouly-Bohringer
Flammarion – €12
editions.flammarion.com
“Screams come from the room, she doesn’t want to go to the shower with the nurse… Nothing helps, it’s a no that doesn’t call for negotiation. Then my sister makes this gesture, which I decipher in slow motion, dumbfounded. She takes off her jacket, her sweater, as if it were normal, takes my mother’s hand and leads her to the shower. I can’t see, but I can hear, I can hear her undressing her and washing her… My sister’s no swordswoman, in normal life she doesn’t pick up quickly, but here she’s leaving us all behind. She understands that dignity is slipping away from our mother’s body, and that there’s only one intimate who can catch it and give it back, just a little… She despises chaos, she creates new codes, she turns a moment of total perdition into a moment of grace… We don’t all have the same capacity to adapt… Each of us has to find our own front, our own weapons, and fight as best we can. And we shouldn’t start comparing ourselves, but she’s a hell of a fighter, my sister…” (pages 53-55).
With a simple phone call, a kind of time-out that sounds like a death knell, you see your mother’s life flash before your eyes, and yours along with it. At 26, in the passive, unemployed, good-family girl genre, the truth is, you haven’t done much with your life. But now, it’s your mother who may be leaving, and for good. So you panic, you flee, you search, you move your arms and legs at the same time, and the latter – which you’d previously thought long – is now pressing and unknown. The face of your new enemy.
You don’t say it, but for once you’re afraid of losing. In this game, where illness is all too often a step ahead of the amateur. Those who know (the famous “white coat talking” effect) have put words to this new reality, which you integrate immediately, without waiting, and guess what without the right of retraction. Brain cancer.
So, Cellule is short (109 pages) and fast-paced, with no room for relaxed pedaling – that’s what brain tumors are all about. Apparently, author Lou Marcouly-Bohringer both wanted and needed this urgent pace, this highly accomplished tension, to make us drink the cup. Or maybe she wrote her first novel fast and furiously, a formidable tool for getting rid of and finally healing from this intimate episode. Only she knows.
Elisa Palmer
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