Novel of the week
Francesca Carington
GRATITUDE by Delphine de Vigan, tr George Miller
French author Delphine de Vigan is best known in this country for Based on a True Story, her taut psychological thriller dancing along a thin line between fiction and memoir, which Roman Polanski made into a film. Her latest, Gratitude, is something else entirely. A slim novelette about an old lady with aphasia, its primary mode is one of absence: of memories, words – and even plot.
The novel’s protagonist is Michka, an elderly Jewish lady who moves into a home as her memory loss worsens. She starts to see a speech therapist, Jérôme; he and Marie, a woman Michka took in as a child, observe her decline. In her dreams, Michka is plagued by guilt, and decides to try to find the couple who hid her from the Nazis in the war. That’s about all there is in terms of action; the unremarkableness of the story is the point of it, and where its poignancy lies.
Yet de Vigan is frustratingly reserved: themes are flirted with but hardly probed. Regret, language and the fallibility of memory are dealt with in one-liners: “Without language, what’s left?”; “Ageing is growing used to loss.” Enticing reflections like “what can still take my breath away after 10 years in the job, is how long childhood pain lasts” have zero follow-up.
Still, Michka’s deterioration is depicted movingly: “She’ll never again perform the routine she’s gone through hundreds of times before: turning on the television, smoothing down the bedspread, washing the saucepan…” Much of the novel is conversations between Michka and Jérôme or Marie, full of ellipses, unfinished sentences and malapropisms (an unenviable challenge for a translator, which George Miller rises to nicely). There’s horror in the humour of these linguistic mix-ups – “It’s best to call a staid a staid.”
“I know full well how this will end,” says Michka, unperturbed. Despite – or because of – its gappiness, there’s sadness in this simple tale.