Montreal Book Fair | On the bedside table of… Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve

This Saturday, Maude Nepveu-Villeneuve, author of the novel After Celeste, will participate in a round table on perinatal bereavement and infertility. She recommends three readings related to her activity.

Laila Maalouf
Press

Here, elsewhere, by Matthieu Simard (Viola)

“I think subconsciously, it was this book that was the spark for mine. I read it long enough before I started writing [Après Céleste], but I thought about it. It is a book about the mourning of a child; it’s a couple who go to live in an isolated and imaginary village, and there is magical realism. It is a book that I found overwhelming. I remember crying a lot while reading it, and the images stayed with me for a really long time. ”

Winter spirit, by Laura Kasischke (Christian Bourgois)

“It’s a book that talks a lot about motherhood, but about mourning the dream of motherhood, in fact. It is the story of a family that adopts a child in Eastern Europe. And finally, it is not the child that they had to adopt initially; they went for the first time, they met a child, then they come back and they have the impression that it is not the same. But they live in a kind of denial of that and the illness of the daughter they adopted. They refuse to see the signs. There is also a lot of denial of the mortality of our children. It’s very tragic as a book, and we are at the border of magical realism. ”

The year of magical thinking, by Joan Didion (Grasset)

“I read it while I was in the writing ofAfter Celeste. The author tells of the sudden death of her husband while their daughter is in a coma. In the following book, Blue nights, she tells about the death of her daughter. I was most interested, in fact, in the way she talks about grief in The year of magical thinking ; she talks about it in an extremely fair and sincere way, but we see in the form of the book the circularity of this magical thought with which we grapple when we are in mourning because we are like in a kind of infinite negotiation with reality. She’s going through two terrible tragedies at the same time, and it’s very lonely. ”

Visit the Montreal Book Fair website