Life hangs by a thread, a thread to which we attach ourselves or which we choose to cut
The blue face, Patrice Robin, POL
Patrice Robin almost did not see the light of day. Born strangled by an umbilical cord around his neck. His mother was then giving birth to her maternal grandparents far from any hospital. A true miracle, he will receive the oxygen an uncle used for his torch welding!
Another miracle, his mother. She narrowly survived a threshing accident that killed nine people. She is four years old.
Richard him, is not a miracle, his death he caused it. He was only twenty-six.
Their common point, their relationship to death but also their origins, all three come from a modest background.
Patrice Robin decides to investigate these three events, to come back to his life, that of his mother and their friend Richard.
An investigation that sheds light on the world from which he comes, that of little people as the philosopher Pierre Sansot called them precisely to show their richness.
Getting out of this environment but not forgetting it, we recognize the theme dear to Annie Ernaux to which Patrice Robin does not fail to refer.
The last part of the book focuses on the writing workshops that the author leads with young people with great academic difficulties and other people treated in psychiatry. Workshops that offer them a kind of rebirth, even recognition.
All of Patrice Robin’s work revolves around these invisibles, the invisibles that he gives us to see. A moving work of humanity.