2023-11-02 15:36:04
Anger and Envy
d’Alice Renard
Éditions Héloïse d’Ormesson, 160 p., €18
Autism? No, precocity! Mmmh, more like thyroid problems, right? The doctors were each “confident of their move” when they examined Isor, the heroine of this astonishing first novel. When the story picks her up, Isor is 13 years old and does not speak. “Never a word, no matter how small, that has meaning, or that is addressed to us”tell his parents, whose alternating voices occupy the first part of the novel.
Doctors think the girl «crippled »the father, severe, believes her “stricken with a form of debility”. The mother, so gentle, is sure that the child “understands the essential, and the essential only, and that she, above all, does not want to bother with the rest.” It’s not that she can’t learn. It’s because she doesn’t want to.
A child like no other
Isor does not adopt the gestures of his age, mocks everything that is neither emotional nor sensory. With her, it is the body that speaks. “Isor is beautiful when she is alive. And luckily for her, she is all the time”, rejoices his mother. But sometimes, Isor’s violent outbursts petrify his parents. “It never lasts long – half an hour, at most. Then it’s like a tragedy that has passed over us” (his mother, always).
Anger and Envy is first of all the story of this stubborn, fierce difference. The difference that isolates, that gives caregivers the impression of sacrificing themselves. “I was not made to be the father of such a child,” laments the father. The couple had to give up sending her to school. They live as a threesome, behind closed doors.
“Watch over her” by Jean-Baptiste Andrea: a fantastic destiny
Will the friendship born between Isor and a neighbor shake up the situation? What if something, something else, suddenly became possible? As a form of communication? A bond being created? When she comes to see Lucien, the old man from the house next door, whose words punctuate the second part of this polyphonic book, doesn’t Isor express “joy for thirty” ? She is still silent, but transformed.
Openness to others and to the world
Open up to yourself, to others, find your voice, make it resonate, even internally. Succeed in “listen to the silences”. This is what Alice Renard tells us, who knows what it means to be different, having been diagnosed “precocious” at the age of 6. She is now 21, studying medieval literature at the Sorbonne.
It’s easy to imagine that Isor is perhaps inspired by her own journey. Value does not depend on the number of years, they say. So Alice Renard, who drew on the seven deadly sins to title her novel, has become accustomed, since the release of her book, to the titillation of another – a capital sin – in her: pride.
Although she may have blushed, Alice Renard’s style demonstrates great mastery: the fragmented narrative structure that she uses, the way in which the different narrators unfold over the pages, weave a fairly stunning canvas. The language is also reinvented under his pen. We would like not to have to reveal too much, not to divulge the third part of the novel and yet… At the end of this story, the reader will find a story of freedom and revelation to the world, an act of consolation, of reconciliation, and of supportive and loving parents.
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