It is the cover page that first attracts attention. A collage. A woman, dressed in a white dress and a red sweater, above which floats a half-face. Her clothes are covered in bright red crayon lines, which seem hastily scribbled. Behind, a black background that threatens to engulf it.
The work — created by visual artist Marin Blanc — evokes loneliness, vertigo, disconnection. However, it gives off an impression of gentleness, benevolence, acceptance.
The fragmentations, the first novel by Mélanie Boilard, sails in the same waters. A real journey through the twists and turns of the tortured mind of an anxious woman, the book details the impact of anxiety on the body, on self-perception and on the occupation of space.
“How can you belong to the world if you only know how to detonate in space? asks Gabrielle, the narrator. This young woman is consumed by an anguish that blurs the contours of her existence and blurs her perceptions. His body, inhabited by a vast terror, threatens at any moment to break, to spread in indigestible fragments on the floor, and this, in general indifference.
Because Gabrielle lacks attention. His parents’ love has always healed none of his wounds, directed as it is towards Zoe, his older sister, perfect, in control, modeled on society’s expectations. As proof, his baby album, filled with laughter, memories of melting ice cream, rompers and races across the field. Gabrielle’s album, for her part, is empty; ultimate symbol of the will of annihilation of his parents towards this unwanted child, come to break the family balance.
When her belly begins to swell, the narrator looks with dread at her distended skin, symbol of the parasite that makes its nest in her entrails. Yet again, no one notices the changes plaguing her figure.
Because he refuses to fall into self-justification, The fragmentations is a difficult book. His story—and his complex, hard-to-love character—exists for anyone to pick up snippets of it, but it can’t be explained, painted over, walked the path romanticism, even less that of redemption.
With her elliptical and highly colorful narration — which would benefit from slowing down at times — Mélanie Boilard exposes things as they are, does not shelter from platitudes or the banality of everyday life and does not seek to make sense. confused thoughts of a psychotic mind. It would be accepting to attach a taboo to the flaws of mental health. Here, the reader is encouraged to accept what he cannot understand — the walls that turn black and swallow up, the crises, the fabrications, the wickedness —, to show openness to the different facets of human fragility. and to find, somewhere in this darkness, the plots of hope that the writer sows, like pebbles that allow you to find the way back to yourself.