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,” François-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.)
"The question of identity haunts Aubry's slim, tough novel about a Parisian lawyer suffering from bipolar disorder...virtuosic sentences and ingenious structure...the reader feels privileged to gain access to these troubled minds."
New York Times Book Review
"Aubry's sense of the human condition is both startling in its originality and sharp in its beauty: the reader might find himself reading a book that is in fact reading him back, in that what we learn...may apply to everyone searching for their authentic self."
Leia Menlove, Foreword Reviews
"Aubry’s lucid prose has ascended to the heights of poetry."
Publishers Weekly
“Madness may, as Gwenaelle Aubry writes, ‘name nothing, in reality,’ but her Personne definitively conjures its somethingmakes it tenderly felt in all its mystery, horror, and sorrow. Standing between the hard reckoning of autobiography and that which implores, melancholically, ‘to be novelized,’ Personne pushes softly at the limits of what life-writing can be. It is a work of remarkable understatement and earned majesty, both.”
Maggie Nelson, author of Bluets and The Art of Cruelty
“Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Personne is a beautifully rendered and conceived
work. Structured like a duet, with writing by her dead father and
herself, Personne is about the search for a wanderer father in the
morass of his unstable identity. It is an impassioned novel, a
psychoanalytic double session, an examination of the limits of
language, and an act of filial devotion.”
--Lynne Tillman, author of Someday This Will Be Funny
“The words are simple yet offer tremendous power. The fact is: we want to dog ear every page to relive certain moments, those certain expressions that put our hair on end
”
Le Figaro Litteraire
"A testimony bereft of pathos
[No One] achieves a double portrait: that of a fragmented man searching desperately for unity through writing, and that of a daughter who will succeed where her father failed by making him a novel’s hero
”
Magazine Litteraire
"A cubist and polyphonic portrait, ridden with elegance and restraint, [No One] is a two-fold autobiography of a father and daughter, its threads are delicately woven with impressions, memories and language that recreate the figure of complex and engaging man, stranger to the world- yet, also stranger to himself
”
Le Monde des Livres
"Her (Gwenaëlle Aubry’s) words, persistent and fixed in the glance of she who cannot save him, resemble a string of melancholy diamonds
may she be reassured: with this powerful book, she pays her debt of love in full
”
Le Point
“Page after page, with meticulousness and infinite tenderness, [Aubry] probes the biography, perspective, staggering failures, and the terrors of this man.”
Télérama
“[Aubry's] admirable book, woven with uncertainty, is altogether an intimate investigation, a declaration of love, homage, and tomb.”
Télérama
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