Ann d’Angleterre by Julia Deck
Since 2012, Julia Deck has published acidic, playful novels that offer hilarious satires of our times, perfectly constructed and paced, and packed with references to the world of noir novels and movies. These little gems have kept us on the edge of our seats from first page to last.
With Ann d’Angleterre, the novelist takes on a seemingly entirely different challenge, recounting her mother’s life and the story of their relationship, starting with the event that every child dreads: the accident that marks the beginning of one’s parent’s assisted living. From the very first chapters, shock, pain, anguish and guilt assail the narrator. To keep them at bay, she throws all her strength into the fight. Her goal is to obtain proper, dignified care for her mother. She spares us nothing of the dereliction of France’s public geriatric emergency care, where understaffing, exponential workloads and the pressure to free up beds have taken their toll on the quality of diagnosis and patient care. The result is chilling and infuriating.
Alternating with this struggle, Julia tells us about her mother’s life, in a sober, classically-styled formative story, in which she and her mother become the characters whose adventures she narrates in the third person.
Born in Manchester, Ann’s story reflects the rise of the middle class thanks to industrial growth which followed the end of WWII. Underneath the tale of a gifted child who loves to learn, the chronicle of a young woman’s emancipation in the 60s and the 70s, followed by the slow dissolution of her marriage, Julia digs underground galleries in pursuit of the truth as others would search for a subtext. She feeds her search with the memories of others, with her mother’s diaries and her favorite novels. But the mystery surrounding her mother resists the vast amount of information she gathers:
“Enfant, je m’expliquai l’étrangeté de ma mère par la confusion du français, le fait qu’Ann était étrangère. Le passage à l’anglais quand j’avais 16 ans ne nous a pas rapprochées. Ma mère vient de l’extérieur, étrangère à sa fille, à son mari, à ses amis, à la famille d’Angleterre. En dépit de toutes les informations que je dispose, elle reste la personne la plus opaque que je connaisse.”
[“As a child, I explained my mother’s strangeness by the confusion of French, the fact that Ann was a foreigner. Switching to English when I was 16 didn’t bring us any closer. My mother was an outsider, a stranger to her daughter, her husband, her friends, her family in England. Despite all the information I have, she remains the less readable person I know.”]
However, fiction will offer Julia a way out, by allowing this accomplished novelist to tell the story of the stubborn, overflowing love, resistant to simplification, between Ann and her daughter.
Ann d’Angleterre by Julia Deck, éd du Seuil.
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