• My Life as Edgar
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Archipelago Books

My Life as Edgar

My Life as Edgar

by Dominique Fabre, translated from the French by Anna Lehmann

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Available as E-Book French Literature
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Edgar loves nothing more than listening to the birds in the trees, the squeaking of moles in nearby chalk quarries, the conversations trickling out of the carpeted offices surrounding his favorite park in the suburbs of Paris. He also listens to the hushed conversations of passersby, strangers who whisper that he is “not all there.” But what constitutes the supposedly insufficient nature of Edgar’s interior life? Dominique Fabre gives himself over to Edgar’s way of seeing, his sensitivity, his innocence and wisdom, his longings and perceptions, his tentative interpolations into the social fabric of 1960s France, and in each passage we find a stirring answer. Fabre’s lucid, layered, and utterly fresh bildungsroman will take you by surprise and leave an immutable mark on your heart.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9781953861481
Pages: 198
Publication Date:

Praise

As a narrator, Edgar is as compelling as he is frank in his self-revelations. His thoughts follow no logic and range quickly between topics about which he assumes the addressee – the psychiatrist who first assessed him at the age of three – has full understanding. Equally, sudden flashes of information unintentionally disclose the poignancy of his life . . . However, this striking, original novel never plays Edgar's plight for pathos. Instead, through the resourceful use of fiction's possibilities, we discover a bitter form of truth.
—Declan O'Driscoll, The Irish Times

A sort of savant, somewhat developmentally disabled but clairvoyant, Edgar spends the first years of his life with his divorced mother, then is sent to a foster family in Savoie . . . Sensitive, innocent, and wise, he has an unusual sense of humor that shows the inverted world in which he lives . . . Fabre’s tale . . . carries an important message: saving language and culture from oblivion is one important way to repair the world.
—Alice-Catherine Carls, World Literature Today

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