If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces: Fragments on Death After Anna de Noailles

by Christina Tudor-Sideri

“the trembling metaphor of why we live, and how, and for how long, of how we strive for a good death, the kaleidoscopic haze of what remains on the path once we’ve shed our febrile skin in a miasmic atmosphere where everyone has been asleep for ages and the only sound a heart makes is that of the pen touching the page” With lines from Les Vivants Et Les Morts by Anna de Noailles as preambles to its fragments, If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces is first and foremost a refusal of the modern tendency to exile death and the dying, but also an invitation to revisit the old Epicurean Death is nothing to us.

Genres: Fiction, Poetry

117 pages, Paperback

Published April 17, 2023

Reviews

[Nathália · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is not made of language, this is the burning touch of fingers and tongues connecting all the life and death within us. pure idiosyncratic magic.

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The trembling metaphor of why we live, and how, and for how long, of how we strive for a good death, the kaleidoscopic haze of what remains on the path once we’ve shed our febrile skin in a miasmic atmosphere where everyone has been asleep for ages and the only sound a heart makes is that of the pen touching the page.”

In If I Had Not Seen Their Sleeping Faces, Christina Tudor-Sideri takes the lines from Anna de Noailles’ poem Les Vivants et Les Morts and builds off them to create a series of fragments on death. Reading these fragments is like staring into the abyss of your own mortality. It’s that overwhelming feeling of vertigo where death feels more tangible, but so does living. As always, Tudor-Sideri guides the reader along with a sober, yet consoling touch and a prose that begs to be poetry. It is beautiful, but it hurts.

“How nature sighs, and intimacy becomes the very act of living, and dying, and being born again.”

“…time that passes and pages that rustle and exhaust themselves”

“On this skin, I keep your touch and the shadow of your breath.”

“Let us dance to the sound of our denied existence.”

“Devour me. In dreams, I say: devour me. Dressed in the darkness of the night, in the tendency toward decay, when no exposure truly matters.”

“The heart, reminiscent of erotic dimensions and rooms where music and books, and the very best of what we know so intimately all linger in the air.”

“My reflection outlines the night in unseen shades of sea and wildflowers.”

“Night comes, it devastates us, and in its arms, the body rests.”

“There could be no poetry without the repetition of a thought that struggles to understand itself, no poem without the madness of a day that strives to become night.”

[Jesse Farmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterclass in profound, fragmentary literature.

Christina Tudor-Sideri reveals the solace in absence.

This book soars while escaping a single, summative understanding. It consoles through the chasing of an expanding and overwhelming horizon that is both abstract and deeply resonant.

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will never be able to write a review to a book so deeply personal to my life. All I can say is that this book has sunken into my soul, and will always sit inside there as a way to keep my hands suspended in midair, so that within a tear I can build a temple from the heavy shapes that grief and death shadow across one’s face.

This quote from A Death In the Family by James Agee, one of the most beautiful books on grief and death, encapsulates my feelings.

My darkness, are you lonely?
Only listen, and I will listen to you.
Only watch me, and I will watch into your eyes.
Only know that I am awake and aware of you, only be my friend, and I will be your friend.
You need not ever fear; or ever be lonely; or want for love.
Tell me your secrets; you can trust me.
Come near. Come very near.
Darkness indeed came near. It buried its eye against the eye of the child's own soul, saying:
Had ever breathed, had ever dreamed, had ever been.

[Nick Grammos]

Normally, I would swallow a book meditating on death whole. But...

This book gets a real thrashing in the socials. Perhaps, and I'm only suggesting here, that modern marketing can leave us perplexed when we get the parcel at the end of the process. Was it the journey all along, of wishing and willing, wanting and desiring. Is the all life is, or was, when it comes to meditations on death.

It attempts to be something profound, delving into a poetic style of writing prose. It uses the author's knowledge, through translation, of the poetry of Anna de Noailles, as 'prompts' for each section of prose. The original appears more interesting than the progeny. I'm only reviewing this for closure. If I had realised it was so derivative I would not have bothered. Using the works of previous writers maybe like standing on the shoulders of giants. But like the REM song goes, '... leaves me cold...' Sounds mean, I know.

I've come to accept that in this media savvy world, writing directed at public relations, marketing, media campaigning and the like may be better than much literary output. Oh, well...

[Robert Hitz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quick, thoughtful, poetic vignettes about death. Some were exceptionally beautiful. Found myself here by way of literary twitter, which indeed exists, and is indeed most of the time a worthwhile space to peruse. I snapped pictures of several passages and sent them to a family member. They asked what the book was titled, rather, what it was about, and after telling them they replied that surely the writer was occupying a very secular mindset. Then I turned the page and found the word God on every other line. Needless to say I was intrigued and quite perplexed. I digress… contemplating one’s mortality shifts into focus, more often than not, when the passage of time becomes ever more, shall I say, observable, especially when you recognize how quickly your child is growing up. I think it’s extremely healthy for such contemplation. And ffs, even if every passage doesn’t land, finding such a book second hand for such a second hand price is a no brainer.

[Reuben Slade · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's super interesting to read someone writing in a language that isn't their first - a la Beckett.

It's sometimes obscurringly sentimental - but, of course, it is a book about death.

Regardless, this little book is filled with phrases that I like very much:

'Silence piles up'

'we'll dissolve into each other'

'the days fled, without my eyes having counted them'

'knowing nothing of what originated its misfortune'

'elsewhereness'

'I took a photograph of my damaged body and held it up to the sun'

'Why this abundant murmur of fountains?' (favourite)

'paradoxes, little paradoxes'

[Miha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing. Brilliant.