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Published Jan 2012
112 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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 a fictional memoir in dictionary form that 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; 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.
"By the end, though the alphabet has been exhausted, 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 something - makes 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
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