{"id":302636,"date":"2015-10-01T16:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-10-01T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wdev.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent-dev\/2015\/10\/01\/were-not-here-to-disappear\/"},"modified":"2018-04-16T14:57:30","modified_gmt":"2018-04-16T14:57:30","slug":"were-not-here-to-disappear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/2015\/10\/01\/were-not-here-to-disappear\/","title":{"rendered":"We're Not Here to Disappear"},"content":{"rendered":"

Originally published in French in 2007, We\u2019re Not Here to Disappear<\/em> (On n\u2019est pas l\u00e0 pour dispara\u00eetre<\/em>) won the Prix Wepler-Fondation La Poste<\/em> and the Prix Pierre Simon Ethique et R\u00e9flexion<\/em>. The work has been recently translated by B\u00e9atrice Mousli and comes out from Otis Books\/Seismicity Editions next week.<\/p>\n

John Locke believed that a person is someone who is conscious of his own existence; this attribute was his personal identity and \u201cwithout consciousness there is no person.\u201d<\/p>\n

Monsieur T. has stabbed his wife five times. He was found in the neighbor\u2019s yard and subsequently interrogated by the police. His answers to their questions provide little or no pertinent information:<\/p>\n

\n

What is your name?
\nNot me.
\nWhat\u2019s your first name?
\nIt doesn\u2019t belong to me.
\nAnd your last name?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Monsieur T. is suffering from Alzheimer\u2019s disease. He is unable to connect with the wife and family he once knew, he struggles to interact in everyday social situations, he is frequently geographically lost, aphasic, and circumstances come to a head when he is arrested for stabbing his wife.<\/p>\n

Rosenthal\u2019s novel is part history, part investigation, and written like stream-of-consciousness poetry. I like that from the beginning she refers to Monsieur T.\u2019s diagnosis as \u201cA.\u2019s disease,\u201d a term that brings the focus to his experiences and conditions, rather than focusing the reader on their preconceived idea of Alzheimer\u2019s.
\nThis is a novel which requires reader involvement. If you are like me, you may end up reading this in small pieces in order to better digest it. I found that although it\u2019s a compact book, the ideas represented are much larger. This novel rewards the thought and energy the reader gives to it.<\/p>\n

Rosenthal drifts between narrators and narratives. The (his)story of Dr. Alois Alzheimer (whose name is eventually given to the degenerative disease) is interspersed with observations from Monsieur T., his wife, his daughter, and his doctor. Does the narrative history of Dr. Alzheimer provide the reader insight into Monsieur T.\u2019s symptoms? It at least provides the reader insight into the \u201cdiscovery\u201d and naming of the disease whose key attribute is forgetting.<\/p>\n

\n

Is there something you\u2019re afraid of?
\nI can\u2019t tell you.
\nRecite me the alphabet.
\nI\u2019m not dressed for that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A 1990s study of Alzheimer\u2019s disease observed that nursing-home staff assumed that patients living with dementia experienced life as meaningless. The nursing home staff (in the study) avoided all but task-oriented communication with those suffering from Alzheimer\u2019s and related dementia. Another 1990s study described nursing staff\u2019s observation of patients\u2019 speech (or attempts at speech) as nonsensical and devoid of meaning, further contributing to the idea of the person\u2019s loss of identity and self.<\/p>\n

Although a reader may assume that Monsieur T. is losing his identity, it is not because Rosenthal has written him that way. [Spoiler alert]<\/strong> The deeper you get into the book the more you learn that what initially seems like Monsieur T.\u2019s incoherent rambling is, in fact, based on his life experiences. I felt both relieved that Monsieur T.\u2019s repeated references made some sense, and uncomfortable that I had previously assumed that they were a symptom and had no basis in reality.<\/p>\n

This is a beautiful book, a thoughtful book, but by no means would I call it a comfortable book. Throughout the text are \u201cexercises\u201d that Rosenthal has placed which test the reader, not on what they have read, but on how they might approach problems faced by the characters.<\/p>\n

\n

Do an exercise
\nCalculate mentally the number of people you usually refer to in the past tense.
\nNot the dead of course, the living.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

These exercises are poetic, shocking, and beautiful; at least I found them so. This was not a fast read for me, and the exercises are just one of the reasons. I wasn\u2019t exactly \u201csavoring\u201d the book, but it was impossible for me to read it faster.<\/p>\n

The writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was recently quoted as saying, \u201cWhy did people ask \u2018What is it about?\u2019 as if a novel had to be about only one thing.\u201d We\u2019re Not Here to Disappear<\/em> is not about one thing; it\u2019s not just about A.\u2019s disease, families, memory, or identity. I believe that there\u2019s something in this book for all those who truly love literature. This final excerpt from the book is one of my favorites, and one which I hope will show you the beauty of the language Rosenthal, together with her translator B\u00e9atrice Mousli, uses:<\/p>\n

\n

Don\u2019t keep anything for yourself, let it out, all that is yours, you\u2019ll see in the end what\u2019s left, and if nothing is left it\u2019ll be because you\u2019ll have exhausted the whole of your possessions, of your memories, don\u2019t hold anything back, let it all go, you\u2019ll see what constitutes each hour, each minute, each second, nothing other than the unwinding of time at a rhythm you can\u2019t know if you\u2019re unencumbered and covered and filled with your story. After you shed yourself, you empty yourself, the outside enters, it enters again and again, it enters all the time.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally published in French in 2007, We\u2019re Not Here to Disappear (On n\u2019est pas l\u00e0 pour dispara\u00eetre) won the Prix Wepler-Fondation La Poste and the Prix Pierre Simon Ethique et R\u00e9flexion. The work has been recently translated by B\u00e9atrice Mousli and comes out from Otis Books\/Seismicity Editions next week. John Locke believed that a person […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":166,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[67486],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-302636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/166"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=302636"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":335636,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/302636\/revisions\/335636"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=302636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=302636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rochester.edu\/College\/translation\/threepercent\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=302636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}