An autobiographical story of an abused child, Ootlin is above all a great book which questions the possibility of salvation.
“How far can you go before a heart stops?”. With Ootlina text inspired by her youth in social services, Jenni Fagan explores this tragic question without blinking an eye. Born to a mother suffering from psychiatric disorders, Jenni was immediately placed in care. She goes from abusive families to homes that are far from deserving the name, and encounters, all along her route, various incarnations of evil and violence, including criminal institutional indifference. “I am learning to leave my body,” writes the author soberly. In many ways, Ootlin is a terrible, often upsetting book. What is being said here is of the order of the unbearable; it remains, here and now, unbearably relevant. To write it, the novelist delved into the voluminous social services files concerning her. However, here we are not faced with a simple testimony, but at the heart of an important work, which returns to its own genesis. Without ever betraying the absolute brutality of the facts, the evocation here is powerfully sensorial, sensitive, and sometimes leaves room for moments of poetic grace.
We owe in particular to Jenni Fagan The Drinkers of Light (Transfuge Prize for best English-speaking novel) and The Devil's Daughter. The journey through darkness haunts his work. A first version ofOotlin had been written before a planned suicide – like a long farewell letter. Jenni Fagan took up this text twenty years later, to give it a new form. It is indeed the work of an author at the height of her maturity, capable of making the past the subject of a book as ruthlessly precise as it is universal. There are few books that command admiration to this extent both in content and form. Despite the darkness faced, it is a luminous book. It is the possibility of salvation that is constantly explored here. The child abandoned by everyone discovers the joy of writing poems in secret. Jenni Fagan traces the roots of her love of words; a love that is all the more incandescent and absolute because it is a lifeline. “Words are truly magical. They take me to the only place where I feel like I belong without having to apologize.” We sometimes think of An angel at my tableJanet Frame's book like the film Jane Campion made from it, another story of salvation through writing. The latter is not only a way of escaping the present, but also of reclaiming one's own history. Words are a weapon that is all the more powerful because they were first used against her, to tell her that she was worthless. “It’s a story about how some stories saved me and others destroyed me.” Ootlin is a dark tale, one of those that Jenni Fagan says served as a moral lesson to her as a child. We follow the destiny of a child confronted with the worst among her peers and yet never renounces her own part of humanity. Dazzling.
-OotlinJenni Fagan, translated from English (Scotland) by Céline Schwaller, Métailié, €23
