I REMAIN IN DARKNESS

Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2022A powerful meditation on ageing and familial love, I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie Ernaux`s attempts to help her mother recover from Alzheimer`s disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman`s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. Haunting and devastatingly poignant, I Remain in Darkness showcases Ernaux`s unique talent for evoking life`s darkest and most bewildering episodes. `Acute and immediate, I Remain in Darkness is an unforgettable exploration of love, memory and the journey to loss.`` Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing`In this work of shocking honesty and intimacy, Ernaux bears witness to her mother`s final years of living and dying with dementia. ... Sometimes the diary entries are little more than notes. They are often inconsistent, but this is part of the author`s point: the self is not coherent: an `I` is full of contradictions: you can hate what you adore. The result is a meditation on the gradual loss of agency and identity. Ernaux writes of memory, of love, of loathing, of disgust, of tenderness: she writes about the frail, leaking, helpless, horrifying body, about the porous self. The narrative was always death. Writing was always an act of betrayal.` Nicci Gerrard, The Spectator`Ernaux`s mother died of Alzheimer`s disease: like John Bayley`s memoir Elegy for Iris, Ernaux`s memoir catalogues the deterioration of a once powerful, almost totemic presence, a fall so cataclysmic that it cannot be analyzed or contextualized, only reported. In I Remain in Darkness (its title taken from the last coherent sentence her mother ever wrote) Ernaux abandons her search for a larger truth because, in the face of a loss as profound as that of her mother, all attempts to make sense of it have the feel of artifice.`` Kathryn Harrison, New York Times Book Review