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Summary
Summary
A stunning evocation of the shifting emotional landscape of a man who has lost his way and a daughter who cannot find her father, No One is an intimate novel of love and loss.
Cleaning up her father's home after his death, Gwenaëlle Aubry discovered a handwritten, autobiographical manuscript with a note on the cover: "to novelize." The title was The Melancholic Black Sheep, but the subtitle An Inconvenient Specter had been crossed out. The specter? Her father's disabling bipolar disorder. Aubry had long known that she wanted to write about her father; his death, and his words, gave her the opportunity to explain his many absences--even while he was physically present--and to sculpt her memory of him.No One is the portrait of a man without a true self; a one-time distinguished lawyer and member of the Paris bar who imagined himself in many important roles--a procession of doubles, a population of masks--who became a drifter and frequent visitor to mental institutions. Moving between the voices of daughter and father, this fictional memoir in dictionary form investigates the many men behind the masks, and a unified portrait evolves. A describes her father's adopted persona as Antonin Artaud, the poet/playwright; B is for James Bond; H is for homeless; and, finally, Z is for Zelig, the Woody Allen character who could transform his appearance to that of the people around him. Letter by letter, Aubry gives shape and meaning to the father who had long disappeared from her view. The whole is a beautifully written, vivid exploration of a particular experience of mental illness and what it can reveal more generally about human experience.
Author Notes
A novelist and a philosopher, Gwenaëlle Aubry studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and Trinity College in Cambridge. She published her first novel, Le diable détacheur (Actes Sud), in 1999, followed in 2002 and 2003 by L'Isolée (Stock) et L'Isolement (Stock) and Notre vie s'use en transfigurations (Actes Sud, 2007), written while in residency at the Villa Medicis in Rome. She is also the author of several nonfiction works including a translation of a treatise by Plotinus. In 2009, she won the Prix Femina for No One.
Trista Selous lives in London, where she works as a translator and teacher of French. She has published many translations and is the author of a book on the novels of Marguerite Duras.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her first novel to be translated into English, Aubry, a philosopher and writer, examines mental illness in a story that unfolds in dictionary form, contrasting rigidity with the chaos of madness. Lou, a 36-year-old writer, sorts through her dead father's papers, encountering a "map of his melancholia" that presents a picture of a man struggling to contain a dark, disturbing shadow self. Once a successful law professor and the author of "a brilliant thesis," Francois-Xavier Aubry was, beneath a mask of normality, "no one." Even before his death, he was unknown and unknowable to his child. Now, faced with his writing, Lou must "plug the gap between the ordinary world" and the secret world of her father's mental landscape. What she discovers is a certain form of truth. However, "in his own oscillations from angel to beast, joy to pain-each of them excessive-his inner multitude and his always escaped self," there lies a larger truth as well, a piercing insight about the private world contained within each of us. By the end, though the alphabet has been exhausted, Aubry's lucid prose has ascended to the heights of poetry. Winner of France's Prix Femina prize. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
New York Review of Books Review
The question of identity haunts Aubry's slim, tough novel about a Parisian lawyer suffering from bipolar disorder and the havoc he causes in the lives of those close to him. Written from a daughter's perspective after her father's death (and with names unchanged to create a blurry fictional boundary), "No One" takes the unusual form of a memoir-as-alphabet-book, with each letter illustrating a different aspect of François-Xavier Aubry's life and illness. "H," for example, is for "Hoffman (Dustin)" whom her father strongly resembled. The writer recalls watching "Kramer vs. Kramer" and "thinking, looking at this father alone in an apartment with his child, that he had done just that for us too, . . . keeping his ghosts and delusions at bay to perform the actions that cradle childhood." The elder Aubry's madness manifested itself in a 200-page manuscript on which he scrawled the words "To be novelized," an injunction the author honors by liberally quoting from her father's own words. The lives of the mentally ill and those who care for them are inevitably visited by repetition and exhaustion, and Aubry's meticulous explication of her father's condition can't help containing instances of both. Yet her virtuosic sentences and ingenious structure make up for the narrative stasis. The reader feels privileged to gain access to these troubled minds.
Library Journal Review
In her Prix Femina winner, French novelist/philosopher Aubry chronicles a daughter's attempt to piece together a portrait of her mentally ill father after his death. The book is written in the form of a memoir, with each chapter named for a letter of the alphabet-from A for her father's adopted persona, the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, to Z for Zelig, the character in Woody Allen's film who could change to resemble those around him. The narrative alternates between the father and the daughter, who discovers a manuscript among his possessions that reveals his anxiety even in seemingly happy times and his struggle not to succumb to bipolar disorder. Meanwhile, we see the daughter seeking happy memories, trying to convince herself that sometimes she did have a "normal" father. VERDICT A moving testament to the impact of mental illness on a family, the novel has a fragmented structure appropriate to the task of reassembling a shattered persona, which does, however, keep it from attaining a sense of dramatic momentum. Recommended for those drawn to books like Colin Thubron's A Cruel Madness and Bebe Moore Campbell's 72 Hour Hold.-Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
