Everything went well from Emmanuèle Bernheim Review

Unlike in the past, the finding is “not great”. André Bernheim has already put away many things: bypass surgery, spleen removal, pleurisy, pulmonary embolism and a fractured skull that had caused him a nocturnal assailant with a gun piston. He always has recovered.

But this time everything is different. the Achtundachtzigjährige could not get more, no longer speak one morning stroke. His daughter Pascale alerted the emergency services and her sister Emmanuèle, writer, screenwriter and author of this autobiographical novel.

The father was connected to the intensive care unit of a Paris hospital at the monitors and erstversorgt, then transferred to the neurology. He can speak again – and get upset: about the double, he must share with an “old man”, and because he hunger “dies”

Because Monsieur Bernheim is demanding.. The art collector – gay, married, two grown daughters – is a colorful figure of the Paris scene and knew how to enjoy life to the fullest. he was still his wife, ill at Ischia.

Um for years severely depressed and Parkinson few days before the strike, taking care of a nurse permanently. Otherwise, he has not done everything ourselves, keep all the reins in hand, if not out of hand.

Now enforce the events changes, and urgent. The daughters need powers. It comes to the absurd scenes of macabre comedy, comes as a deaf notary with thick glasses before his squinting eyes father bedside because he badly understands itself, roars into Father’s ear, as if this deaf. Because the daughters of the room rush into the corridor and “sobbing with laughter.

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father’s condition is deteriorating rapidly. Soon he babbles only unintelligible fragments of words, then he can not swallow more. It lies in a crib, must be wrapped, breathes through an oxygen mask. Whether it ever rises again, the chief physician says to the daughters, “alone will show the future”; “The state of mind” was crucial; you give antidepressants and will move the patient to rehabilitation in another hospital.

Emmanuèle visited him there, she is surprised. “They had shaved him. I thought he looked better.” Her father smiles again “as before, with sparkling eyes,” and he speaks clearly as since his stroke no more. What he says, however, upset his daughter to the limit and will have profound implications, “I want you to help me to call it quits.”

Emmanuèle as stunned. She remembers that her father was when she was thirteen, desperate to be that he was talking about wanting to shoot himself. She flees from the room, runs headlong through the streets and parks until they soaked with rain and sweat is overtaken by night. A taxi brings them home, only a sleeping pill makes them “ready for the nightmares.”

Although André Bernheim has had to grow up his two daughters without authoritarian pressure (Emmanuèle was born in 1955), but now he repeatedly called and unyielding, they like him help on his last step afford: “do not let me down.” In this tremendously complex problem it leaves them no choice. Only of thinking, he makes her assistants, accomplices that can be tried under French law to imprisonment. Which instance is to be decisive for the inevitable decision of women – the paternal wish? The laws? Moral, ethical, religious arguments?

Not that endures particular Emmanuèle in this process determines the language style of the book in which she describes how she finally together with her sister does the desire of the Father result. The short sentences, sometimes only one or two words that hunt in a precise staccato away like in a good live report and dig the emotions of the reader on.

Emmanuèle lets her feelings only run wild when no one sees them. Then she cries violently melts like a “giant block of ice” in order immediately afterwards to cover up everything with “powder, lipstick, eyeliner a bit.” Her love for her father is in the foreground. She hopes that he may yet have to rethink or meet the fate of a decision. In their distress ( “I am not the.”) She is looking for a doctor who prescribes their drugs.

With the help of a friend contacted Emmanuèle a Swiss euthanasia organization. Documents need to be worried. The medical record of his own father not give her; only a friendly physician she receives them. Not even the scheduling tool is simple: Pascale has the vacation dates of their children taken into account, and the whole of May is unfavorable ( “too many holidays”, the festival in Cannes …)

The final phase of the plot brings further. downright strange new situations, such as from a turbulent film. Due to a display, the sisters are summoned to the police station and interrogated separately. Fortunately, shows a policewoman understanding (she has her brother lost after a long battle with cancer), embraces Emmanuèle and finds comforting words: “I would have done the same as you … Do what your heart tells you.” After consultation with the family lawyer’s daughters but not accompany her father on his last journey. They stay in Paris, to draw off by a visit to the cinema and wait for the phone call from Switzerland.

It has hired two drivers to control the ambulance. The tour runs adventurous. After hasty departure succeeds the two to create the old man at breakneck ride on the safe side of the Swiss border and to deprive him at the last second the clutches of the French authorities. The reason for the ambulance to know the men (both Muslim) only at breakfast together, and they are shocked: “Suicide is against their religion.” Once again telephonic persuasion is necessary to finally call the contact person reported: “Everything went well.”

Emmanuèle Bernheim’s ” Tout s’est bien passé < "Emmanuèle Bernheim: "Tout s'est bien passé" at"

This book I have on the list to my 20 favorite books” / p >