My Life as Edgar

by Dominique Fabre, Anna Lehmann (Translator)

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781953861481
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	05/16/2023
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	5.39(w) x 6.47(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Dominique Fabre possesses a unique voice among contemporary French novelists. Focusing on the lives of individuals on the margins of society, his work combines somber, subdued realism with lyrical perception. Fabre has produced 22 works of fiction over the last 25 years. In 1995 Maurice Nadeau published Fabre’s first novel, Moi aussi un jour j’irai loin, to much critical acclaim. His Fantômes (Serpent à plumes) received the Marcel Pagnol prize in 2001. In 2008, Archipelago published his novel The Waitress Was New, translated by Jordan Stump, and New Vessel Press published his novel, Guys Like Me, in 2015.

Anna Lehmann has translated selected songs from Patrick Modiano’s Fonds de tiroir for Harper’s Magazine. In 2019, The New York Review Children’s Collection published her translation of Yvan Pommaux’s All of Us. She lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

01/30/2023

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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"A sort of savant, somewhat developmentally disabled but clairvoyant, Edgar spends the first years of his life with his divorced mother, then is sent to a foster family in Savoie . . . Sensitive, innocent, and wise, he has an unusual sense of humor that shows the inverted world in which he lives . . . Fabre’s tale . . . carries an important message: saving language and culture from oblivion is one important way to repair the world."
—Alice-Catherine Carls, World Literature Today

"Edgar, for all his concerns about the gaps in his memory, is an endearing child trying to tell his own story as best he can. In the process, he unwittingly tells a much larger tale about the lives of children whose parents are unable, or unwilling, to care for them, the systems in which they find themselves—day homes, boarding schools and foster families—and the value of consistency and support, wherever one may find it."
—Joseph Schrieber, Rough Ghosts

"As a narrator, Edgar is as compelling as he is frank in his self-revelations. His thoughts follow no logic and range quickly between topics about which he assumes the addressee – the psychiatrist who first assessed him at the age of three – has full understanding. Equally, sudden flashes of information unintentionally disclose the poignancy of his life . . . However, this striking, original novel never plays Edgar's plight for pathos. Instead, through the resourceful use of fiction's possibilities, we discover a bitter form of truth." — Declan O'Driscoll, The Irish Times

From the Publisher