This short book looks like a literary UFO. Somewhere between the prose poem, the fragmented story and the botanical manual, all sprinkled with magical realism, This is not a garden is an interstice offering a touching look into the inner life of a young woman struggling with invasive suicidal thoughts.
Returning home after a trip, she finds an envelope containing seeds in her mailbox. Seeds which turn out to be those of an invasive plant, which little by little takes up all the space in her apartment, even if she insists on tearing everything out, again and again.
Between combativeness, despair and plant fascination, the presence of this intruder of course echoes the narrator’s own inner torments, as she tries to maintain an appearance of normality.
And that is the beauty of this iconoclastic object, which offers a gentle metaphor, imbued with accuracy, on depressive states and the way in which they invade the lives of the people who experience them.
“My pain does not sink into the ground, its roots are fragile. It is airy, contagious. Small capsules containing millions of seeds which adhere to the skin and clothing. »
This is not a garden
The Wick
140 pages