“— My name is Francoise. I live on rue des Érables, at 87, she murmurs. All is not lost. Get back on your feet, slowly. It must. But how when “there is no more compass to guide her”? When she “dies like an autumn. Day after day […] slowly. A long time “. In The jumbled head, her second novel, Hélène Lapierre recounts the slow and trying degeneration of this woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. She evokes her lucidity vis-à-vis this decline, but also, and with likelihood, the effects on those around her, on her husband, Hubert, on her daughter, her friends, her grandson. Thwarting the rules of punctuation, regularly omitting the comma, Lapierre evokes by this syntactic anarchy the chaos which settles in Françoise’s head, her ideas, her tangled preoccupations. The style however sins by excess of sentimentality, giving way to hackneyed images which attenuate the force of the subject. The whole is punctuated by the words of Hélène Dorion who, with her soft and enveloping poetry, marries the tragic slowness of this disease.
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