No One

December 19, 2011
In her first novel to be translated into English, Aubry, a philosopher and writer, examines mental illness in a story that unfolds in dictionary form, contrasting rigidity with the chaos of madness. Lou, a 36-year-old writer, sorts through her dead father’s papers, encountering a “map of his melancholia” that presents a picture of a man struggling to contain a dark, disturbing shadow self. Once a successful law professor and the author of “a brilliant thesis,” François-Xavier Aubry was, beneath a mask of normality, “no one.” Even before his death, he was unknown and unknowable to his child. Now, faced with his writing, Lou must “plug the gap between the ordinary world” and the secret world of her father’s mental landscape. What she discovers is a certain form of truth. However, “in his own oscillations from angel to beast, joy to pain—each of them excessive—his inner multitude and his always escaped self,” there lies a larger truth as well, a piercing insight about the private world contained within each of us. By the end, though the alphabet has been exhausted, Aubry’s lucid prose has ascended to the heights of poetry. Winner of France’s Prix Femina prize.

January 1, 2012

In her Prix Femina winner, French novelist/philosopher Aubry chronicles a daughter's attempt to piece together a portrait of her mentally ill father after his death. The book is written in the form of a memoir, with each chapter named for a letter of the alphabet--from A for her father's adopted persona, the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, to Z for Zelig, the character in Woody Allen's film who could change to resemble those around him. The narrative alternates between the father and the daughter, who discovers a manuscript among his possessions that reveals his anxiety even in seemingly happy times and his struggle not to succumb to bipolar disorder. Meanwhile, we see the daughter seeking happy memories, trying to convince herself that sometimes she did have a "normal" father. VERDICT A moving testament to the impact of mental illness on a family, the novel has a fragmented structure appropriate to the task of reassembling a shattered persona, which does, however, keep it from attaining a sense of dramatic momentum. Recommended for those drawn to books like Colin Thubron's A Cruel Madness and Bebe Moore Campbell's 72 Hour Hold.--Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC

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