“In my lower body, the flames on my left side are silently unleashed. The fist in the center of my back clenches. The big one settles comfortably on the chair which crushes my foot. He takes a newspaper. Consult stock market values. It is in these words that Miranda Fitch, central character of Everything is finedescribes the chronic pain that has eaten away at her since she fell off stage performing Lady Macbeth.
The drama experienced daily by the heroine of Mona Awad, a Montrealer living in Boston, is disturbingly reminiscent of the one explained so well by Jennifer Bélanger and Martine Delvaux in The elongated (Héliotrope, 2022): “Resume an appointment if it continues, this sentence thrown into the air at the height of their helplessness, and we get dressed, pack up the carefully prepared speech, the verb to suffer become flesh, we leave the cabinet in sleepwalkers summoned to wander in the middle of the night, because it’s still there, it lasts, it lasts, it doesn’t go away. »
Prisoner of her body, misunderstood by her doctors and physiotherapists, dumped by her husband and faithful admirer, treated with contempt or disdain by colleagues who do not believe in her invisible evils, Miranda had to give up her acting career and become a theater teacher in a college in New England. Now, while she wishes to go up All’s well That ends wellby Shakespeare, her students, led by the arrogant Briana, gang up on her to perform the same bard’s “Scottish play”.
“In the center sits Briana, my soulless lead actress, my Hélène, who doesn’t deserve to play Hélène at all. Beside her is Trevor, her boyfriend, who will play Bertrand. And of course there’s Ellie around. My favorite, my actress with gray complexion and eyes. My mouse with a dark heart. Last year, she played the nanny in Romeo and Juliet. This year, she has the role of the sick king, even if she would make a perfect Hélène. »
Even her best friend and colleague Grace and the decorator Hugo, for whom she has a crush, but who does not see her, have sided with the rebels. One evening, in a bar, Miranda meets three bizarre men, nicknamed the Fateful Brothers, a nod to the witches of macbethwho make him drink a mysterious golden drink.
Therefore, the author of Rabbit (2021), another campus drama tinged with humour, horror and fantasy where a suffering woman faces a ferocious horde, turns the drama of Miranda, “dead inside”, into a hallucinatory delirium as dark as jubilant. Like All’s well That ends wellthe novel navigates easily from tragedy to comedy, while the roles and the balance of power are reversed as if by magic.
In this disconcerting vortex into which she precipitates her characters, Mona Awad forcefully translates the courage and the will of a broken woman who wants to burst the bars of her prison of flesh and the prejudices which paralyze her in spite of herself. An original ode to the resilience of women.