Marcel

'What makes me saddest, is the double silence of her being. Language has packed its bags and jumped over the railing of the capsizing ship, but there is also another silence in her or around her. I can no longer hear the music of her soul.' One day, the author's mother no longer remembers the word for 'book'. This seemingly innocuous moment of distraction is the first sign of the slow disintegration of her mind. As Alzheimer's disease sets in and language increasingly escapes her, her son attempts to gather the fragments of what she has become, writing a moving, loving chronicle of the gradual descent into dementia of someone who 'no longer knows who she is, where she is or what will happen'.

A wonderful, balanced novel about how the remains of the past reverberate in the present, sensitively and delicately describes the powerful emotions which lie just beneath the surface of the unruffled sheen of village life. Joris’ father died young, and his mother moved to Spain, so he has lived with his aunt and uncle since early childhood. He is quiet and introverted, and his aunt and uncle fear that he harbours a deep resentment for the loss of his parents. The gentle pace of life in the village is suddenly disturbed when a decision is made to remove the cemetery in the centre. For the boy, this awakens various emotionally charged memories of his dead father. The books ends with the death of the boy’s foster parents, marking a definitive end to his youth.