Dominique Mainard: Leur histoire (2002)

The first half or so of this uneven book – which is about trauma and more particularly the hell of illiteracy in a modern world – is exquisitely written in a language of its own, feeding the reader with pieces of information at a slow pace, you can wince for the traumatised characters, feel for their lack of ability to communicate, to cocoon themselves in on themselves. Nadèjda is one of the two main characters, a woman whose literacy stopped at the age of six, when her grandmother died while reading to her.

From then on Nadèjda – whose ancestors come from a country she can't put a name to but from which her grandparents had to flee from to save their lives – is one of the walking wounded. She manages to find work in a bird shop and starts living with a man who is aware of her illiteracy even though it isn't spoken about, although her verbophobia is apparent from the way she tries to steer him away from reading. But the crisis point comes when Nadèjda discovers that her companion keeps what seems to be a journal: she draws a rectangle round each word and fills them all in. By her companion's reaction she feels that she must leave, and he gives her a large sum of money for the abortion of the child she's carrying.

But she decides to have her child, Anna, who is perfectly capable of speaking but doesn't, she carries the verbophobia through to another generation, and because of these problems is bullied at school and moves to a school for the deaf and dumb. The teacher there, Merlin, knows that Anna has something special in her, and he also realises that Nadèjda too has a great number of psychological problems which need bringing to the fore, to exorcise them.

It seems evident where all this is leading, that Merlin is in love with Nadèjda and vice versa, and from there we go downhill, into sentimentality. Some those scenes of the school celebrations are a little too soppy, and although there's a (very unexpected because so rapid and oddly situated) naked sex romp in Merlin's car, and although that's not exactly the end and all three are happy ever after, the final two chapters (and the last in particular) aren't as could be predicted.

That final chapter spins us almost into a dreamscape, almost into a nightmare world set in and around Nadèjda's parents' holiday seaside bungalow, where many odd things happen. There are so many beautiful words in this book that I ended up really disappointed way before the end.