My Life as Edgar
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A sensitive portrait of one boy’s travels from earliest consciousness through his salad days in the countryside and onward by a “genius” of “nuanced interior moments” (Los Angeles Times)
Fabre’s ability to act as a “discreet megaphone of the man in the crowd” (Elle Magazine) will take you by surprise and leave an immutable mark on your heart.
Edgar loves nothing more than listening to the birds in the trees, the squeaking of moles in nearby chalk quarries, the conversations trickling out of the carpeted offices surrounding his favorite park in the suburbs of Paris. He also listens to the hushed conversations of passersby, strangers who whisper that he is “not all there.” But what constitutes the supposedly insufficient character of Edgar’s interior life?
Dominique Fabre gives himself over to Edgar’s way of seeing, his sensitivity, his innocence and wisdom, his longings and perceptions, his tentative interpolations into the social fabric of 1960s France, and in each passage we find a stirring answer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A child's memories of his troubling early years flood the slack, underwhelming latest from Fabre (The Waitress Was New). The reader first meets Edgar, the narrator, in 1964 Paris. At three, he barely speaks, and he's internalized the frequent impression from others that he's "not all there." Despite what others think, though, he has a rich interior life. In a clever move, Fabre makes Edgar's exceptionally large ears a metaphor for the child's ability to pick up on people's thoughts. "Mickey Mouse was deaf compared to me," Edgar narrates, explaining how he's able to "hear" other characters' internal monologues. In one of the narrative's few pivotal scenes, Edgar witnesses his mother, Isabelle, meet a man named Bernard, whom Isabelle then sees for a brief period. (Edgar's version of Bernard's first impression of Isabelle: "She's afraid of everything... her kid's sick. She's beautiful, she doesn't know she's beautiful.") Edgar is then sent to a foster home in the country until he's 11, and his account of these years is a jumble of scatological obsession, vague references to the May Uprising of 1968, and puerile accounts of "play lovers" with a foster sister. Previously, the author gave captivating voices to characters on the margins. This time, there's little more than a faint echo.
