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Marie Darrieussecq: Notre vie dans les forêts (Our Life in the Forest)
This novel is set sometime in a mythical future. We do not learn either the location or the era in which it is set. Our heroine is.Viviane, a clinical psychologist by profession. Viviane is not a real name, but a fugitive name. Her real name is.Marie.
Her half is called Marie as is normally the case with both sharing the same name. . A half, in this book, is apparently a human being of some sort which spends most of its life sleep and when woken up can barely walk. Its function is that it it is used sfor spare parts or the other half.Viviane has already had a kidney and a lung and during the course of the book will have a replacement eye. It seems to us horribly cruel, but is taken for granted. When she was youngerViviane visited her half in a special hospital for halves. She had had to get special permission and it was a long journey journey. She was accompanied by her mother mother but her mother could not enter the hospital and had to wait outside .Viviane tries to engage in some conversation with her half.
Now Viviane lives in the forest with many others and carries on her life as a clinical psychologist. Why they fled to the forest is not entirely clear but it seems that there was some type of upheaval with a lot of violence, and kidnapping. They feel relatively safe in the forest. We dived into the ocean depths, and onto the Moon and Mars, and Jupiter’s satellites, and then the habitable planets, we we no longer really have anywhere to hide on Earth. In the forest, it is cold and they have very limited facilities such as no running water an rudimentary habitation. The halves also have to do the work and and are trained to do basic labouring work.
Viviane has two main clients during the course of the book. The first is a woman who was on a plane when it was hit by a missile and crashed in the Sahara desert. Everyone else, including her husband and children were killed. She survived by digging a hole for herself and taking items from the plane to keep her cold. Not surprisingly, the crash had a profound traumatic effect on her.
Viviane has treated a lot of people with burnout and suicidal tendencies and soon finds out thatt he most important requirement of shrinks is that they are there.
Her second client is a clicker. Their job is to teach the robots all our mental associations, so that one day they’ll be able to make them instead of us. He hates his job and comes to her not to be helped with his mental issues but purely for rest and indeed they have sessions where neither of them talk.
Her general advice seems to be the old AA adagei: Give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
The courage to change the things I can change.
And the wisdom to know the difference.
On the whole, she enjoys living in the forest, even though it is somewhat cold. Apparently they have a zoo there which even contains the( extinct in our world.) Tasmanian tiger.
We learn about her family, including the fact that both her parents were killed by electrical appliances, her father father by a toaster. She did have a boyfriend, but it did not work out for either of them.
T hen things start get strange. She is approached first by a pigeon and then a dog, both of which carry messages for her. She is not entirely sure what they mean. Then she has her eye operation and it is very painful when she removes the dressing it is not what she expected. Clearly, it is time to flee .All children have implants from birth and these are intended for monitoring by the robots. It iI not easy to remove them and indeed quite painful but she manages to do so and flees further into the forest where she joins another group. But now she must ask herself who or what she really is.
As you can see this is a decidedly strange book but one of the joys of reading Darrieussecq is her strangeness. It is not quite clear when the action is taking place, where the action is taking place and, indeed, what is actually going on. Who is Viviane? Even she is not sure.
Publishing history
First published in French in in 2017 by P.O.L.
First English publication in 2018 by Text Publishing Company
Translated by Penny Hueston