The Disappearance Book

In 1980, due to a drunk-driver in another vehicle, French journalist Geneviève Jurgenson's two young daughters were thrown out of the window of her brother-in-law's car and killed more or less instantly. Since then, she has been a principled and able campaigner for road safety awareness, and has had two other children. This, though, is another sort of response to loss, a cry all the more raw for being disciplined and channelled. The Disappearance is a book of letters to a friend, written, or apparently written, over an extended period, in which she discusses different aspects of her bereavement--the useless regrets at having let them go on that particular outing, the sense of there having been hours she could have spent just breathing in their presence and found other things to do, the counting off each year of what they would have been doing and simply how old they would have been had they lived. It is in the nature of grief to repeat itself, and Jurgenson finds ways to acknowledge this without boring her reader--this is a book which deals with pain in a controlled fashion, and combines the raw honesty of its American equivalents with the solidly balanced craft of the French epistolary novel. --Roz KaveneyRead More