| Synopsis: |
The day after his mother's death in 1977, the influential literary philosopher Roland Barthes began a 'mourning diary'. Taking notes on index cards, as was his habit, he reflected tersely on a new solitude, on the ebb and flow of deep sadness, and on the dismissal of grief from modern life. These 330 cards, the contents of which are published for the first time in Mourning Diary, provide a skeleton key to the themes Barthes tackled throughout his work, a working draft of what its editor, Natalie Leger, describes as "not a book completed by its author, but the hypothesis of a book desired by him." Above all, this is an unclassifiably intimate text, in which Barthes pays homage to the woman who gave birth to him, and with whom he lived until the end. |