"Exit" by Nelly Arcan

"WE ALL PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT TO KILL OURSELVES . "

This is the first sentence of Exit, the latest novel by Isabelle Fortier under his pen-name Nelly Arcan. Well known in Canadian literature, this author always manages to tear out my bowels (Can I say this in English? It seems less macabre in French, but whatever...). When I read her, I want to scream, to fight back and cry. Her novels are always a heartfelt response to this life that no one knows the secret.

In Exit, true to herself, Arcan addresses the issue of self-hate, but this time she's raising the debate of suicide link with it. Antoinette Beauchamps, the narrator, is a young suicidal girl. Death would be a relief for her life, because life is only pain and sorrow. She lives isolated from everyone except from her mother and her uncle Leon. Her life is directed by the purpose of committing suicide. It emphasizes the point that this is not only because she wants it, but that it is a kind of disease, or rather a lack at birth: the desire to live. According to her, it might be hereditary because her grandfather committed suicide and Leon also would commit suicide a few years later. In fact  through the death of her uncle, Antoinette discovers the key to her own suicide.

What mystified me the most about this novel is the creation of the company Paradise, key in hand by "Mr. Paradise", a former doctor who saved thousands of people from death whose now upsets by the suicide of his only son.

"He saved many people from death. Now he saves people from life . "

To be entitled to his suicide measures, Antoinette must pay the monetary award, but also prove by a series of events that her desire to die is incurable. The reader knows in advance that the organized suicide did not work and caused the paraplegia of the narrator. From her bed, she tells us since childhood what took her to her failed suicide in the Marie-Antoinette genre, what she can remember of it, and how this story ended up changing her life in a way that the reader cannot predict.

It was a strange experience to read this book knowing it was published after the author's suicide (two months later). Far from being a book "pro-suicide" or a kind of explanation of the author, the narrator rather tells how the writing of this novel, how the creative process, creates an invaluable sublimation.

To be honest with you, I have a friend who does not like Nelly Arcan at all. She says she is "too much in her head" and "that nothing really happens in her novels." Indeed, her novels are psychological, emotional, in the likeness of that moment when your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. Lots of things happened, but all things are always put in front of a completely different future.

This woman is just so beautiful.

She remembers me of the women of my mother's family.

Visit her website. Tell me if you like this Canadian author from Quebec! (My province: it would be a shame to not mention it!)