Mourning Diary
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Intimate and deeply moving, Mourning Diary is a profound study of grief and solitude, drawn from the lost diary of influential philosopher Roland Barthes.
The day after his mother's death in October 1977, Roland Barthes began a diary of mourning. Taking notes on index cards as was his habit, he reflected on a new solitude, on the ebb and flow of sadness, and on modern society's dismissal of grief. These 330 cards, published here for the first time, provide a unique glimpse into the themes Barthes explored throughout his work. Behind the brilliant mind hailed by Susan Sontag as "the most consistently intelligent, important, and useful literary critic to have emerged anywhere" lay a deeply sensitive man who cherished his mother with a devotion unknown even to his closest friends. Mourning Diary offers an intimate portrait of loss and loneliness from one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
These pense es on the process of grieving the loss of a mother are an invitation to eavesdrop on a densely qualified (in the finest sense) rational mind touched by eternal loss. While continuing his life work, the great French cultural critic Barthes (Mythologies) kept notes of sadness and selfreflection on slips of paper. This fragmentary book begins the night after his mother's death; informing it all is the presence of absence. Although conflicted by the very process of making literature from grief, Barthes (1915 1980) contemplates such day-to-day, unexpected spells of sadness as living in an empty apartment; how the role reversal of caring for a dying parent affected him; the larger mysteries of time; and his own generalized mental state ("Not even the desire to commit suicide"). Compiler and annotator Le ger is to be commended, as is redoubtable translator Howard, who, in a nostalgic afterword, describes both his experience with Barthes's mother, Henriette, and the relative merits of the craft of rendering any book into another language. This volume is both a window into the soul of a philosopher and a unique contribution to the inspirational literature of the adult child left behind. 8 pages of b&w illus.
