Before me, I really wonder what there was. Kids often believe that everything begins the moment they’re born, but not your humble servant Edgar. I’m not even sure I could find the place where I lived before without making a mistake, Madame Clarisse Georges. I’m still not all there, but I know how to hide it well. I’m grown up now. I’m still quiet and unassuming too, but I’m not sure that won’t change. Sometimes I want to shorten all this and get right to the train station platform, to the moment we’re going home. I’ll be eleven then.
In a new translation from the French, My Life as Edgar (originally released in 1998 as Ma vie d’Edgar) is a strange little book about a strange little boy and his strained efforts to understand the strange and seemingly unknowable world around him. The novel opens with Edgar describing himself as having the “features of a kid with Down syndrome – a kind of coldness around the eyes, pale lips, big cheeks, a big butt, though my chromosomes weren’t really to blame”; he also has enormous ears, a tongue that won’t stay in his mouth, and at three years old, he drools and moos and growls at people who conclude that Edgar is “not all there”. With a beautiful single mother who doesn’t know what to do with her unusual son, Edgar will be shipped off to a sort of foster home in the country (which he loves) for the next eight years, and when he is finally brought back home to Paris, he will be immediately sent off to a church-run boarding school (which he hates). Throughout, we are in Edgar’s mind as he circles through experiences, mashing up the past and present and the parts he makes up, and even if he thinks of himself as a “noodle” or “the village idiot”, he comes across to the reader as intelligent and self-aware and in need of his Maman. I feel like I’ve encountered this boy-who-is-wise-beyond-his-limitations character before — I was put in mind of The Son of a Certain Woman, The Tin Drum, even in a way Nutshell — and while I suppose it makes some sense for an unfiltered child to use derogatory language when describing himself and others (Edgar frequently thinks in terms like “fatty”, “dago”, and “yid”), it gave me an unsettled feeling (even for 1998, author Dominique Fabre seemed to be pushing the bounds of good taste, but Edgar will repeat what Edgar hears with those enormous ears). Edgar has no control over his situation, thinks more than he is able or willing to communicate, and the interior life that Fabre paints is one of seeking and longing and unquestioned acceptance of a bad lot in life. This short work is more about what happens on the inside than on the out, and overall, it moved me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The waiting room wasn’t full, far from it, yet I wasn’t the only quiet, unassuming child in the Paris area in 1964, and if on top of everything else I weren’t hopelessly lazy, I’d describe to you in one go everything you need to know about 1964, and should the next year rear its head, as soon as I heard the sadistic pop of the champagne corks on December 31st — while hugs and wishes were exchanged — I’d take advantage of the slightest lull to inflict 1965 on you. And so on and so forth. It goes to show I won’t have lived in vain.
The opening scene has Edgar and his Maman (with her dark and ever-traumatized gaze) visiting a psychiatrist at the hospital at Rue d’Avron, and throughout the interior monologue that follows, Edgar will frequently address himself to this Madame Clarisse Georges; as though making up for their only in-person meeting at which he said nothing at all. Edgar then narrates going to the Parc Monceau with his beautiful young mother and it is here that they first meet Bernard: described initially as a doctor who saved an old woman’s life in front of them, and then as an accountant at a baby cereal factory who helplessly watched the old woman die, and finally as a man they later met on a train, it isn’t until much later that Edgar admits, “I made up what I didn’t know. I didn’t know much.” And so, while the narrative mashes up events from different periods in Edgar’s life, and it’s unclear what is real and what is invented, it is clear that Edgar (no matter his cognitive abilities) is doing his best to make sense of his existence.
I said oh, the Seine! to Isabelle, but I didn’t bellow so I wouldn’t hurt her feelings. I didn’t want her to think I was still the same moron from Rue d’Avron. She looked straight at me with surprise, as if there was no doubt now that I was there. There were two Edgars in the dictionary, but there were four Édouards next to them, with their portraits so you wouldn’t mix them up. Maybe there would be three when I was the president. Meanwhile, Maman sighed to give herself courage, Edgar the noodle was coming home.
It seems that it was the suitor Bernard who convinced Isabelle to send her son off to the country, and perhaps it was later paramour, JP, who suggested boarding school when he was old enough; and while Edgar wishes he could express himself more fully than a mumbled “Well yes” when his Maman calls to check up on him, you don’t get the sense that he blames his mother for abandoning him — both the farm and the boarding school are filled with the children of unwed mothers. This might well be a perceptive social portrait of 1960s-70s France (the 1968 “revolution in Paris” plays out in the background and Uncle Jos at the farm has communist sympathies) but its primary value to me was as the story of this little boy who might look and act unusual, but whose heart and mind functioned the exact same as my own; this is the universal story of the quest for love and meaning and the reader roots for Edgar to find them. I was invested, and ultimately, moved.
