Can we say that this is a story about the separation ? A young woman is about to give birth to her first child and then prepares to lose her ailing father. The child will be separated from it for a romp in the world ; the father will separate it to get remove of all life. Between the hope of birth and the shadow of death, there is it. His doubts, his daily life, his links. The narrator wonders about the merits of an "ordinary life" to be both loved and rejected.
what makes up the flow of the days normal ? The young woman has always had the feeling of being in exile from his own life, as in the perpetual quest of a home port inside. The philosopher Adèle Van Reeth, a journalist at France Culture, wrote an essay intimate about the leak and the force. A life begins and a life ends. The young woman must be present for each of the founding moments of its existence.
Neither the mundane nor the newspaper
The narrator makes the acquaintance of the work of the american philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) on the benches of the university of Chicago. She then discovered that the ordinary is an object of interest for philosophy. The ordinary is not the mundane or the everyday. It is perhaps the rejection of the extraordinary and adventure for the benefit of small things and of scenes fleeting. That is what happens when nothing happens ? The narrator realizes that the ordinary life does not appear in the hollywood comedies, as it does not feed in the strength of the plot.
The young woman decides to take the ordinary as a subject of a work. She watches her loved ones, note every detail. Everything becomes a source of reflection. In her pregnancy, she finds the proof of his existence. "I can't doubt everything because I'm pregnant. "Until then, it was not certain to have a center. In ordinary Life, Adèle Van Reeth tells the story of how one "comes to himself" when we give life, and when one is faced with death.
The secret of a exile success, it is to be alone, but in the middle of the other
The mother-to-be already knows the materiality of the things of life. She has three fine sons, of whom she is very close. Adèle Van Reeth evokes the full attachment for the almost son, analysis of the complexity of wanting to "still" live with the beloved man, tells the story of a peaceful summer in the family home when one has no taste for the collective. The narrator is making fun of itself. Only, she waits for the phone to ring. Only, it is annoying when the phone rings. "The secret of a exile success, it is to be alone, but in the middle of the other. "
It promises to advance the state of the soul from the intranquillité to anxiety. The portrait of the father of her son, soon convinced by the necessity of having a fourth child, is one of the success stories of ordinary Life. He tells to his three boys already born the story of a man who has locked his baby in the washing machine under the eyes of his wife. The three terrified children want to know what happened ? "Well, he's dead ! "
Recent days
The story of Adèle Van Reeth is composed of moments of life and pieces of thought. The practical and the theoretical are the hand. You'll meet Ralph Waldo Emerson, Virginia Woolf, Beauvoir, Pascal, Henry David Thoreau. The author says his admiration and his affection for Clément Rosset. Ralph Waldo Emerson lost his eldest son in 1842. The father is living is suffering to know that life will continue without the dead son. He can be happy again makes it unhappy.
The last pages of ordinary Life are devoted to the ailing father. The young woman visits him. She fears the end. "How to separate myself from him ? "Father and daughter find themselves all the two, awkward and magnets. The young woman brings with her a son a little bit of life goes out from the father. He asks : "When will go you, already ? "The words creases of emotion as a face refrains from crying. One hears suddenly the sweetness of the ordinary, the silences, the evidence of love. The ordinary Life is a story about separation. The author recalls, she suddenly that she is sovereign in his kingdom of paper ? Here, the father and daughter do not separate. At the end, there is no end.
The ordinary Life of Adèle Van Reeth, Gallimard, 196 pages, 16 euros.
