With “Mes fragiles”, a modest text full of pain, the French novelist and literary critic Jérôme Garcin pays tribute to his recently deceased mother and brother. And reveals that his family carries a genetic anomaly, which he himself passed on to his daughter and granddaughter.
“It was too much. Too fast, too soon. Too little prepared for this new onslaught of pain and regret. Too much anger against fate. Too many deaths”. An urgency runs through this autobiographical book by Jérôme Garcin. That of testifying, as quickly as possible, to an evil that strikes his family and can strike others. In “My fragile”, the author evokes two very recent bereavements. That of his elderly mother and, only six months later, that of his brother Laurent.
Admittedly, the literary critic and producer of “Mask and the Feather” had already mentioned these two essential personalities of his family pantheon, but he had not yet devoted a book to them. For years, Garcin has indeed developed at Gallimard a singular autobiographical work, chronologically non-linear, entirely designed to pay homage to his family.
Early deaths
This literary galaxy had begun with “La chute de cheval”, devoted to the early death of his father, when he himself was only seventeen. It continued with “Intimate Theater”, where he evoked his meeting with his wife, the actress Anne-Marie Philipe, then with “Olivier”, about his twin brother who disappeared at six years old, and finally with “Le syndrome de Garcin”, about his doctor grandfather.
The author has also published biographies, fictionalized or not, where his favorite themes reappear, in particular that of lives cut down too soon, as in “Bleus horizons” dedicated to the poet Jean De la Ville de Mirmont who died during the First World War, or “The last winter of the Cid” where he retraces the last days of the actor Gérard Philipe.
Here, Garcin delivers a moving portrait of his mother, artist and restorer of paintings, who in her life as a very young woman loses a little boy, then her husband, and valiantly resists the misfortunes that overwhelm her. It was in faith, he tells us, that she found the strength to overcome trials. But it is perhaps what Garcin tells us about his brother Laurent that is most striking in this book.
“I had a fragile brother. Now that he is dead, he seems stronger to me, and I feel weaker. In truth, I no longer know which of the two of us was the most fragile”. A few years ago, in “Olivier”, he briefly mentioned this different being, plagued by multiple autistic-type difficulties, whose mother took care of all her life. A silent brother painter of raw art, whose colorful paintings Jérôme Garcin still scrutinizes today as so many enigmas to be deciphered.
A genetic abnormality
Today, the author reveals that the serious handicaps from which his brother suffered were due to what doctors call fragile X syndrome, a genetic anomaly identified only since the 1990s. author discovered that his family was affected, that he himself was a carrier, and that without knowing it he had transmitted it to his daughter and granddaughter.
“I advance, with counted steps, in the labyrinth of mine”. Since his first books, Garcin has wondered about transmission, inheritance, fidelity to origins, about what we owe to our ancestors. Here he seems tragically overtaken by his subject and wavering under the violence of the shock.
Also, he shares with modesty this feeling of guilt of the one who despite himself transmitted a disastrous heritage to his descendants, and seeks to testify in the urgency of the existence of this devastating disease still too little known: “the evil runs” .
Sylvie Tanette /aq
Jérôme Garcin, “My fragile”, Gallimard editions.