How can you right your wrongs in the face of a half-brother “evaded” for 30 years, when your name is Alexandre Jardin? A paper tomb is erected for him.
“At home, we only find eternal rest in a book,” he writes in his new title. Emmanuel was his older brother who committed suicide in 1993 and about whom he tried not to think again, to the point of forgetting this date from his memory.
Then, following what he calls an epidemic of deaths around him, the writer came to the realization that he could no longer erase all these deaths. He therefore sets out to return to these moments shared with the man he considers his “anti-me”, to their roller coaster relationship which left him with nothing but regrets, to the enthusiasm of this young man whom he described as furiously free and terribly poetic.
Through these romanticized memories where he constantly places himself at the heart of the story, he does not quite pay homage to him, even concluding these intimate outpourings with an aside on his “successful” brotherhood with his younger brother Frédéric.
On the other hand, it offers us a new foray into the heart of the garden imagination by adding one more stone to the unbridled family universe of the Gardens.
Brothers
Albin Michel
176 pages