Diacritik really liked it Ann of England by Julia Deck, Prix Medicis 2024: no less than three articles have been devoted to it. Here they are again.
We think about it or we don't think about it”, we try to prepare for it, we refuse to believe it, “as if considering it from all angles would make it possible to improve the worst, or simply to survive it “. Julia Deck writes, from the first pages ofAnn from England, how she tried to come to terms with the inevitable (the death of her mother) before understanding, the day her mother had a stroke, how futile this training was. We don't prepare ourselves for the disappearance of those we love.
“It’s here, it’s now. It's April. It's Sunday. It’s the evening of the first round of the presidential election.” In this presentative and this immobile present, the unthinkable, discovering your mother on the floor in her bathroom. “It’s today, it’s now.” The firefighters arrive, Ann, who “spent nearly twenty-eight hours on the tiles,” is transported to the hospital for life-threatening emergencies. The medical prognosis is very guarded. However, Ann will survive and the shock will trigger her daughter's breathtaking story.
So far, Viviane Elisabeth Fauville (2011) to Monument national (2022), Julia Deck kept her distance from the “I”. She dives in. But Ann of England sign less of a break (even if the author left the editions of Minuit for Le Seuil) than of a recomposition of her previous work. By returning to her family genealogy (and trying to unravel its enigmas), Julia Deck moves the pieces of the puzzle constructed from book to book and decodes its underground autobiographical elements. Ann of England thus offers itself as a dizzying narrative: a magnificent portrait of a woman (of women, moreover), an intense reflection on the links which unite a daughter to her mother (and a mother to her daughter), the recomposition of a works under the sign of truth and keys given to understand what has, since its origin, carried a romantic universe.
Ann of England is a portrait of a woman(s) first of all, of this Ann who came from England, having dreamed of France and its literature: Eleanor Ann was born in 1937 in Billingham, a town in which her sister Betty was also born, the same year of the publication of Brave new world — whose “futuristic universe, entirely mechanized and happy by the miracle of chemistry, owes a lot to the experience of Aldous Huxley at ICI” (Imperial Chemical Industries, the factory that brings the city to life). Throughout the story, according to a subtle alternation of chapters (the past // the uncertain present), Julia Deck recounts the life of her mother and through her a social and intellectual ascension, what bilingualism means, with this English language that mother and daughter share — like a taste for literature. What is filiation, what does a woman transmit to her child, what do we unconsciously embrace as common passions, what do we discard? In this book there is a refusal of the medical emergency alone, of the terrible anguish of losing this mother who had until now been so dignified and autonomous, of the steps to place her in a nursing home once the intensive care phase miraculously passed Ann. What emerges from this terrible moment is the absolute, complex love for the woman that Ann was, the woman that Julia Deck wants to allow her to become again.
What makes the strength of this book is in fact also its register, taking readers through the whole range of empathy, from fear to laughter, including an elegant irony which is a weapon of survival in the face of a Ubuesque situation between saturated hospitals, visits to retirement homes ready to do anything to double the competition, overwhelmed doctors and general fed up while the author is supposed to be on the promotional tour for her latest book — “I feel like a punching bag.” Telling the story of one's mother and oneself as one's mother's daughter is also an attempt to decipher a family secret, about which nothing will be said since it irrigates the entire book. Revealing it or talking about the other female characters would be saying too much and spoiling the tension that carries the story until its last lines.
Story of a life intertwined with others, investigation of oneself, Ann of England is also a book which, while one might (too quickly) think that it breaks with the previous part of the work, recomposes it. Julia Deck evokes Sigma, Monument national, Viviane Elisabeth Fauvillehis feeling of having believed himself to be the “architect” of these stories and of having in fact been the “object” of them. Reality and fiction collide, the novel allows us to explore these categories which are only apparently antithetical. Here again, we will let readers discover these keys, the diabolical functioning of this text which alternates between revelations and obscurations, laughter and despair, desire to know and fear of discovering too much, which masterfully articulates life and literature.
In the last pages, Julia Deck reminds us that “English has two words for foreign: foreignerone who comes from another country, and strangerthe one who comes from outside. Her story is located in the area where these two terms intersect, telling what, in her, remained external to her and joins her intimacy, exposed with modesty, which is not the least tour de force of this very great book.
Julia Deck, Ann of Englandeditions of Le Seuil, August 2024, 256 p., €20
