A beautiful, classy, intense book this one written by Gregoire Delacourt and published by Grasset: L'Enfant Réparé.
I don't have problems in reading accounts of real crimes committed by someone, but stories involving paedophiles are all the time devastating.
It's very difficult for many reasons: first of all this one is the most disgusting crime existing on Earth! perpetrated against angels, kids without any kind of fault.
Looking at the cover of this book, you can't imagine that this sunny kid, curious, sweet, later would have experienced the sexual attention of his father.
If a person experiences something like that, the rest of his existence will mean a perennial fight: big will be the desire to re-discover the kid who had existed before the violence for trying to re-capture the real essence of the being: or, as writes correctly Gregoire, the work will be the one of trying to "repaire the kid" after the horror: said that, the personality of the person won't never completely return to the normality: it means that there will be implications with sex and relationships: the cruelty inserted by the paedophile in the mind and body of the kid won't never permit a healthy and beauty sexual and affective existence.
What built in this book by Gregoire is, more than the story of what his father did to him, the topic is just touched, without insisting too much, what it meant to him to trying to cope with a father who abused him. "I was still a genuine kid when the man touched the Moon" writes. A kid plenty of dreams and expectactions.
It's much more complicated in this case because it's a story of a child and his father: it is true, as writes Gregoire, that not all the men who become fathers, will be great fathers. Absolutely. I agree. For sure, what suffered by this kid has been tremendous.
Gregoire, with great sufferance, tried to elaborate in a way or in another what happened becoming a good person, bringing with him the problematics that every kid abused experiences, being more strong and intelligent than the cruelty experienced: he became an avid reader, he loved to burying himself in a book, for searching answers, for being transported somewhere else, and although affectively experienced problems, his life has been and is successful: he became a writer and much more.
Everything appeared as a revelation when, one day someone somewhere said that it isn't fault of kids when they are abused, but that they are, simply, who they are: victims. And Gregoire understood that this statement, this simple consideration was setting his soul free, because he had constantly felt the sensation of having being part of the process that brought his father in his bed. But, simply, it wasn't his fault.
He became a writer also for this reason: for putting in words his story. It happened with his book Mon Pére. Gregoire tells that once, in a meeting very participated for introducing the book to his readers, started to crying, telling the reasons why he had written that book. A book that under many ways has sets him free. You are never free once abused, but speaking and writing, helps a lot. Both his parents are dead now. Gregoire lost at first his mother and then the father. His biggest desire? To discover that what did by his father against him, was not done "contre moi" writes Gregoire. He won't never know the reason why his father abused him and his pain will remain forever.
Although there was at first conflictuality with his mother, for the reasons that you can imagine, Gregoire affirms that he would want to see her again now and this book is also an act of devotion dedicated to her.
Touching. Please, read it.
Highly recommended.
Anna Maria Polidori
No comments:
Post a Comment