“We spend our time ranting about finding the right word, but about the most important things, those words, we never find. »
Perhaps because language, continues Sigrid Nunez, itself ends up falsifying everything. This is the reality of language. Hence the immense challenge, in particular, of talking about things like love, death or friendship.
This difficulty in saying and experiencing is at the heart of So what is your torment ? (a title taken from a sentence by Simone Weil), which unfolds over the course of several encounters that the narrator has, each time testing her empathy skills: with a sick friend, a landlady, an ex, the son of an old neighbor — and even with a kitten in a dream.
A little flashback to the center of the novel. In September 2017, the narrator visits an old friend who has cancer and is hospitalized in another city for a series of experimental treatments.
A few months later, after a relapse of her cancer, this friend asks the narrator to help her end her life – her two closest friends have in turn refused.
It was rather necessary to fight until the end, one tried to make him understand. According to the dominant discourse, cancer is a fight between the patient and the disease. A fight between good and evil. “There is a right way and a wrong way to behave. A strong way and a weak way. The way of the warrior and the way of the coward. If you survive, you are a hero. If you lose the battle, you probably didn’t fight hard enough. »
The only way people have found to deal with cancer, she thinks, “is to fabricate heroic stories.” Which is nothing to calm the anger that inhabits him. “Who wants to die listening to this bullshit? adds this somewhat surly journalist, who does not let herself be fooled. She intends to lift the veils in her own way.
“If I had agreed to help my friend, in reality, it was because I knew that in her place, I would have liked to have been able to do exactly as she did. For this appointment with death, they will both move into a beautiful rented house in a village in New England. For the two women, these days will be an opportunity for intimate conversations and rapprochements.
In the eyes of the narrator, the world is divided into two kinds of people (she seems to have read this somewhere, perhaps from Henry James): “Those who, seeing someone suffer, think: ‘That could happen,” and those who think, “It will never happen to me.” The former help us bear life, the latter make it hell. »
The seventh novel by this writer born in 1951 in New York, the friend (Stock, 2019), a magnificent and subtle exploration of mourning, friendship, the love of dogs, the comforting power of literature and the cruelties of literary life, won him the National Book Award in 2018.
Meditation on death and aging, on the couple and on friendship, but also a book of active listening and compassion, What is your torment? is not completely dark. In addition to a few sparks, Sigrid Nunez shoots there with all the wood she finds – failing to always find the right words. And without seeming to, also gives us a lesson in empathy.