Black Forest

Starred review from October 21, 2019
Filmmaker Mréjen’s extraordinary English-language debut is a catalogue of mortality. Composed of fragments set primarily in and around Paris, nameless characters concisely meet their ends: a woman chokes to death on a sausage while laughing at a joke at a party; a speeding motorcyclist “lands, miraculously intact, in a green field of wheat” before dazedly stepping into a road and getting hit by a truck; a man suffers a stroke leaving his home, “keeled over on the landing when he was on his way out to fetch a loaf of bread or some other such thing.” Woven throughout is the story of a daughter who finds out her mother has overdosed on sleeping pills while she was getting her hair done, after which “she went to another hairdresser more suited to her style and age, and had her head completely shaved.” The daughter grows up, and readers see her imagining walking with her mother through Paris, remembering her childhood and the distance that grew between them, and experiencing enduring reminders of her mother years later. The book coalesces around the idea that in death “stories were somehow linked to those who’d told them,” and that, to the living, the dead “reappeared at arbitrary moments, according to their own capricious calendar.” Mréjen’s crystalline prose never grasps for sentimentality, and her meticulous, humane, and powerful volume unforgettably depicts the way the dead experience life after death in the traces they leave in the minds of the living.

November 1, 2019

This English-language debut from French writer/filmmaker Mréjen opens with a nameless suicide: a man "decides he's old enough" and replaces the disco ball with rope. The story, however, begins with a divorced father who determines that his children are lacking suitable New Year's Eve party attire and stops by his ex-wife's apartment for proper clothing. Upon arrival, two of the siblings discover their mother's corpse in bed. The older daughter, who was at the hairdresser with the stepmother, must hear the tragic news separately. In the decades that follow, this daughter will reach, then surpass, her mother's age at her death (38). Those moments of the daughter's life--memories, observances, regrets, especially her impossible "what-if" daydreams with a mother-still-living--provide the skeletal narrative, interrupted by seemingly unrelated instances of additional deaths. For those who survive, death remains an ever-present, relentlessly recurring part of...well, life. In language that's laconic and concise, Mréjen writes affectingly without emotional entanglement--"her aim is not to eulogize but to describe, to enumerate, to record," writes Assef (making her full-length translation debut) in her elucidating ending commentary. VERDICT While the novel is "certainly not for members of the cult of the carefree," as Assef wryly notes, internationally-savvy seekers will undoubtedly be intrigued.--Terry Hong, Smithsonian BookDragon, Washington, DC

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