Urgent tale told slowly
In her native France, Marie Darrieussecq is a rock star writer who has written 15 books including novels, short stories, a play and nonfiction. She’s received French literary honours the Prix Medicis and the Prix des Prix, both in 2013 for the novel Men, and writes for a range of magazines.
In the novella Our Life in the Forest, Darrieussecq is a quiet and deliberate teller of a suspense story that plays with all the themes she is known for — identity, belonging, absence, disappearance and transformation.
It may frustrate because many details are spared and, though that makes the story short, Darrieussecq takes her time telling it, dropping obscure clues and hints as to what might be going on. We’re introduced to our narrator, a woman, who is writing — with some urgency — in a forest.
Gradually, we learn the reason for the woman’s urgency; her body, like the world around her, is falling apart. She’s lost the use of one eye; she’s down to one kidney and one lung. Back in her old life, she was a psychotherapist who treated patients who suffered trauma, in particular a man she called “the clicker”.
Every fortnight, she had travelled to the Rest Centre, to visit her “half”, Marie, her spitting image, who lay in an induced coma, her body parts available whenever the woman needed them. Now, she’s part of a group and their halves living in a forest where things have taken an unexpected and disturbing turn: the reanimated halves are behaving like uninhibited adolescents. Surely not, given they’re missing body parts?
It takes place in a dystopian world where sleep is for losers, butterflies are disappearing and robots watch and listen to most everything we do and say. However, the robots are confused by metaphors which, of course, Darrieussecq peppers throughout the book so they are beautiful and effective rather than distracting and annoying. One character tells another, the recipient of a new kidney, “you’re as yellow as a low wattage lightbulb”.
Indeed, Darrieussecq does a fine turn of phrase, often sparing, dryly humorous and evocative: “I glimpse confetti pieces of sky. Sequins of sky. It’s raining blue sky. The sky settles over me.” This is probably just as well.
The narrator tells us in the first line: “I opened my eyes and bang, everything came into focus. It was clear.” Despite that line, things do not become clear for some time; the sense of (possible) menace meanders. You need to go with the intrigue rather than trying to work out what’s happening, otherwise you’ll miss the “bigger picture” stuff about future bodies, identity, clones and even organ-trafficking.