Ma mère rit

by Chantal Akerman, Sabine Lancelin (Preface), Inès Tabarin (Preface)

'Au début c'était un cataclysme avec de la brûlure et de l'exaltation. Des mots, toujours les mêmes sans cesse répétés, j'ait fait connaissance avec les mots d'amour d'une langue ancienne. J'ai tant parlé. J'aurais pas dû. Oui, je revivais. J'arrêtais de voir ma mère mourir. J'arrêtais de ne pas vivre. Il y avait de la vie en moi. Toute une vie. Une pleine vie.' Dans cet autoportrait écrit à vif, dans la brûlure, l'intensité et la crudité du quotidien, Chantal Akerman nous confie pour la première fois la matière même de toute son œuvre, de toute sa vie. Depuis son premier court-métrage à dix-huit ans, Saute ma ville, en 1968, et ses premiers films, Je, tu, il, elle en 1974 ou le film culte Jeanne Dielman, en 1975, avec Delphine Seyrig, jusqu'à son dernier film librement réalisé à partir du roman de Conrad en 2012, La folie Almayer, en passant par ses installations et ses carnets de voyages, films documentaires en Russie, à New York ou dans les pays de l'Est, elle n'a jamais cessé de décrire l'enfermement, la répétition avec l'autre, le désir d'un ailleurs, le vertige de la folie. Ma mère rit est une magnifique plongée dans le cœur, le rire, les joies et les blessures de Chantal Akerman.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Film, Queer, Belgium, France, Biography

224 pages, Pocket Book

First published October 10, 2013

About the author

Chantal Anne Akerman (French: [ʃɑ̃tal akɛʁman]; 6 June 1950 – 5 October 2015) was a Belgian film director, screenwriter, artist, and film professor at the City College of New York. She is best known for Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975); Akerman's influence on feminist and avant-garde cinema is substantial.

Reviews

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chantal Alkerman’s death in October of 2015 affected me powerfully, uncommonly so. Other writers and artists I admired had taken their own lives previously, and there can be no doubt that I had experienced significant personal disturbances as a result of such events, but Chantal was different, her sudden end more wrenchingly tragic. There are certainly a number of reasons for this. First and foremost: Chantal was an artist who had come to represent for me a way, a methodology of connection. I had come to see in Akerman’s work something like the passage from an experience of alienation quintessential to modernism and its discontents toward ways of integrating joy through ecstatic interrelation and creative praxis. Key films like GOLDEN EIGHTIES (1986), A COUCH IN NEW YORK (1996), and TOMORROW WE MOVE (2004) seem especially characteristic of a tendency in her later work to foreground salubrious communal exchange, suggesting of the cinema that it might provide an ideal space for a kind of collaborative play, the audience able to avail itself of some of the core benefits. Chantal Akerman’s films improved my life immeasurably, and occasionally they seemed to suggest that there was a much better world available to us immediately at hand, immanent to the one to which we supposed ourselves prisoner. This all has something to do with hope, maybe even faith. I believe very much that Chantal helped me attain both. Her death could not help but seem like a particular kind of catastrophe in terms my own potential ability to keep the faith. A second factor as regards my particular experience of devastation following Chantal’s suicide simply relates to the fact that she and I both suffered from the same disorder, both of us diagnosed bipolar and medicated in accordance. The third factor has to do with timing, and this probably needs a little elaboration. In October of 2015 I was coming up on two years clean and sober. My mood disorder had stabilized since I had emerged from my last drunk in November of 2013. I had spent some time in a treatment centre on Vancouver Island, my fifth in about seven years, the antipsychotic I was taking seemed to by working well, and I had returned to work in Calgary where I was performing remarkably. For all intents and purposes I was doing better than I had ever previously done. What I did not yet know is that the Autumn/Early Winter period was going to come to be a routine struggle for me. Over the next couple years September and October were going to be difficult months, during which I would be beset, with something close to the predictability of clockwork, by the molasses-thick cogitations, atrophied motor functions, and numb non-moods of clinical depression. In time I would come to be prepared for this seasonal inevitability, able to take precautions and adjust. This was not yet the case in 2015. I was not terribly concerned about depression. I had survived drug addiction and late stage alcoholism of the worst variety imaginable, depression was comparatively minor, provided it not lead to relapse. Mania was a different story. The treatment of my disorder, primarily a matter of medication, is almost completely engineered to forestall the onset of mania, which has had a tendency to lead to psychotic episodes and considerable danger. Chantal Akerman’s suicide coincided with the onset of the first major depression I had ever experienced in sobriety. It was unclear how this was going to play out. Again, I was not yet two years sober. It just so happens that from 2009-2011 I enjoyed a period of sobriety that extended to nearly two years, but I had not quite reached that decisive two year benchmark. 2012 and 2013 had been an absolute nightmare. The situation in 2015 could not help but be informed by this. Everything did go pretty haywire, but I came out the other end of it in fine fettle. This too shall pass, right? Sometime in October of 2015 my psychiatrist provided me a letter stating that I would require some time off work. My employers were agreeable. In November the Bataclan attack occurred in Paris. I was reeling, totally untethered. This all felt like a very decisive period in my life and something close to trial by fire. I had to hold the course. I did. I immediately knew that this period of my life was something I needed to write about. I continue to work on the manuscript for what I often call a “speculative autofiction,” telling an alternative story of how late 2015 (and beyond) might have played out. There but for fortune. The decisive period technically began with a trip to London, England and then Ottawa. My speculative autofiction begins on the runway in Ottawa as I am about to fly back to Calgary. In Calgary I would be back at work pretty much immediately. Then the Calgary International Film Festival was happening, so I was going to be pushing things pretty hard. I would be going to screenings until fairly late and had to be at work by 6:00AM. The festival ran that year from September 23 to October 4th. Chantal Akerman took her own life the day after the festival ended and news traveled pretty fast. (I blogged about some of this at the time: http://cowberryfilmflam.blogspot.com/....) Flash forward: it is September of 2019, I am doing exceedingly well and will have (God willing) six years clean and sober in November. We are coming into the final weekend of the 20th Calgary International Film Festival. I get a free pass as a previewer of World Cinema, and I have seen nineteen movies in eight days. Everywhere I have gone I have carried Chantal Akerman’s MY MOTHER LAUGHS with me. I have read it slowly and with care, often sitting in a theatre waiting for a movie to start or drinking a coffee in a café or bar. There are sentences or paragraphs I have read over and over many, many times. My general tendency is to tear through books in unbridled fashion. Not this time. The book has traveled hither and yon this week. The actual book itself looks pretty traveled, it is no longer in the best shape. MY MOTHER LAUGHS was originally published in 2013, but The Song Cave only brought out the English translation this past summer, so you couldn’t exactly say I have postponed getting around to the book, especially since I knew even before I received my copy that I would read it during the film festival. It struck me as a no-brainer. How to categorize the book, should one believe this in any way vital, may not be entirely clear. It is certainly a kind of diaristic autobiographical meditation, but it is no kind of diary. There are no dates and it doesn’t move sequentially. Rather it eddies, it backs up onto and circulates around the matters that concern it most, approaching them again and again tenuously and from a variety of angles, most especially Chantal’s aged mother Natalia (Nelly), whose days are numbered, and a younger lover named C., who is codependently possessive and ultimately abusive. Tenses are collapsed into one another with a kind of clinical concision. The translator Corina Copp (another C.) addressed the use of the word décalage, which in MY MOTHER LAUGHS she translates as either “jet lag” or “time difference” but which she notes is a French word that reflects how the text itself operates, suggesting “a ‘gap’ in time or space that allows for a particular voice to construct and, importantly, reconstruct itself.” These are considerations bound to enter into a serious literature using the self as its principal subject. Chantal: “I’m just leaving and leaving again and coming back forever.” Time differences cannot help but enter. I recently read the New York Review Books edition of Gregor von Rezzori’s ABEL AND CAIN in which the narrator author-surrogate reflects that his story “has to be told as the ever-present historical content” of its author’s “presentness.” The time of such a task is fundamentally outside of or parallel to the time of lived experience in its strictest sense. The work of creation, and the work that provides a form for its own creations, is an extrahuman work, it apes the divine, as I am hardly the first to have stressed. It is precisely on these terms that MY MOTHER LAUGHS becomes explicitly literary, hardly a mere matter of glorified journaling. We might not be inclined to call it autofiction, necessarily, but it is very much doing what I ask of autofiction, a form of writing that has become extremely critical to me in recent years, starting with the discovery of Pierre Guyotat’s COMA some four or five years ago, a work which likewise may have little or nothing to do with “fiction” per se. What I mean primarily by “autofiction” is a kind of purely literary undertaking with the self and its principal subject, or at least locus, and one which requires new forms whilst posing questions about truth (explicitly a matter separate from mere facts). Akerman writes with quiet clarity and considerable edge. She discussed her “chronic disorder” in a way that speaks to much of what I have already revealed of my own experience. We hear of a past suicide attempt and ongoing struggles. “I was also sick. And I still am. It’s a cyclical and chronic disorder. I take medication every day for my mood. It’s a mood disorder. Yet when I’m in a really good mood I have to be wary. I have to let the really good mood plummet or else I too will go to the hospital where they’ll lock me up. If I have no mood, no mood at all, no desire for anything so no one sees me and I see no one, then they won’t lock me up.” I am not sure I have ever read anything so consonant with my own experience of bipolar disorder and the specific disquietude attendant to it. The balance we need here is key. How to find the pockets of joy and not go off into the deep end. That is the dance we are called to perform. “And when life is lovely we don’t think that each day we’re dying a little, not at all. We just think life is lovely and that it’s a beautiful thing, life, and we make the most of it and then we don’t sleep so much. We make the most of it and we live. We live every moment and for the slightest thing we laugh.” The lovely life is at the heart of all that is beautiful but it is terribly perilous. The passage just quoted invokes laughter, as does the book’s title, the laugh that comes back with mother when she has ventured close to death yet managed somehow to survive, to return. Natalia’s laugh is the expression of the disarming surprise of survival itself. Chantal’s mother has been a key figure in her daughter's cinema, a towering presence, since early on. NEWS FROM HOME (1977), LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA (1978). The epochal character Jeanne Dielman, as portrayed by Delphine Seyrig, began with nothing more than attentiveness to Natalia’s domestic routines. Of course, Chantal’s final film, shot entirely on video, was 2015’s NO HOME MOVIE, a raw and profoundly personal work about this relationship, culminating as it does in the aftermath of Natalia’s death. I took my mom, who is no cinephile, to go see NO HOME MOVIE when it played in Calgary in 2016. I think she was quietly moved by it, even if she had very little point of reference. Although of course she did have a point of reference. My maternal grandmother, who is named Bessie Smith, amazingly, is still alive, ninety-three. My mother is thirty-five days younger than Chantal. Natalia was a holocaust survivor—literally a survivor of the camps—and Chantal often said that she preferred to be thought of as a Jewish filmmaker rather than a female one, the latter designation holding little in the way of sense insofar as she was concerned. In MY MOTHER LAUGHS, Chantal addresses her queer identity as belonging to the domain of an “other” gender, outside of the standard binary, and remarks upon having come to realize that her father was aware of her uniqueness in this respect even though she had done her best to conceal it from him. Chantal knows that her queerness is part of what makes her mother uneasy with her, very often finding fault with clothing and hygiene et cetera, but it also informs their unusual intimacy, explicitly depicted as quasi-incestuous within the buffered fictional representation of LES RENDEZ-VOUS D’ANNA. Natalia is suitably modest, but also gregarious and “modern.” Though it cannot be especially enjoyable for her to no longer be able to take care of herself in basic ways, such as washing herself, she is not ashamed of her own nudity in front of others. “One day, no help came because it was Christmas. So I had to wash her myself.” It is Chantal who feels uncomfortable in making contact with her mother’s naked body rather than Natalia. Tensions that have never been adequately expressed have a tendency to come out sideways, such as when Natalia, hospitalized in Mexico, tells Chantal that she finds her “aggressive.” And so on. A nice little bit of business involving a Mexican doctor: “In the end, the doctor was an idiot but like I read somewhere, the idiots are also victims.” A key piece of wisdom, one we would all do well to carry with us. MY MOTHER LAUGHS travels from Brussels to Paris to Mexico to Harlem, where for a time Chantal lives with C., the Woman from London’s Zone 2 who she originally met online and whose playful jealousy turns out to conceal genuine pathological tendencies. Chantal does not understand C. nor everything C. says. Chantal’s experience of belonging to an auxiliary gender is perhaps bound up with her sense of herself as an overgrown child who has trouble making sense of the world around her or of fitting in where others would have her fit. Her experience is one of fumbling for meaningful connection despite what often seems like the impossibility of achieving this. In Brussels: “As soon as the child arrived, ever exhausted by the adult life it couldn’t live, it went straight for the couch and slept a few hours. Afterward, a little less exhausted, it ate.” The child desires sleep above all else, respite from the manifold perplexities, but sleep can be elusive. One is reminded of course of an expression favoured by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who would himself be dead at thirty-seven: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” Chantal also makes a key point that I have myself made repeatedly. Writing is the only refuge for somebody who has failed to make a life for herself, but it cannot be called therapeutic in the least. Writing “is not a release like people who don’t write imagine. No, it’s not a release. Not a real one.” We go to writing because we have been called there. It can be painful, exhausting, sometimes so demoralizing as to endanger the writer. I have a tendency to imagine that the real work with words, purely with words, is the only conceivable life, the only one available to me. At this moment I am reminded of a verse from the song “Ex-Con” by Smog, a fouvourite of mine in the late 90s:

Alone in my room
I feel such a warmth for the community
But out on the streets
I feel like a robot by the river
Looking for a drink

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

As in her films, the close observational detail, here of breaking relationships and family struggles with illness, opens up the profound. She writes with a simple poetry, interleaving to collapse time and theme without formal affectation, in a way that would strike even to those unfamiliar with her filmmaking. And if you already love her other work, this becomes even more essential a window through and beyond. We miss you greatly Chantal.

[clem · Rating 4 out of 5]

when i watch my mom skin a tomato after putting it into an ice bath after boiling it in her big black speckled sauce pot, i know that i cannot find love like that anywhere else in the entire world. this book reminds me of that, that i want to can tomatoes with my mom.

[María Carpio · Rating 5 out of 5]

Chantal Akerman es una de mis cineastas favoritas. Ahora no sé cuál me parece más maravillosa, si la Chantal cineasta o la Chantal escritora. En ambas se deja el cuerpo y el alma. Pero de otra manera, en verdad, lo suyo es lo nunca visto (bueno, luego se copió su estilo). Su material audiovisual es la vida, su vida, una ficción que imita la realidad y se mimetiza con ella,creando un universo audiovisual propio con un espacio y un tiempo propios. Nunca van a ver nada como eso. En "Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles", son tres horas de la actividad doméstica de una mujer, hilvanadas con tal preciosidad, que los planos larguísimos ni se sienten, son como pinturas vivientes, pero aún así lo explico mal porque ella hace un cosa con las imágenes cinematográficas única. Bueno, esta reseña es sobre un libro, no sobre sus películas pero es que son inseparables. Akerman es el material de ambos, en el caso de Mi madre ríe, también es su familia, sus relaciones sentimentales y sí, su madre sobre todo. Es casi indescriptible lo que hace Akerman en esta pequeña novela, o autobiografía, o auto-ficción, porque en un estilo poco adornado de frases cortas, directas y concisas revela a la vez la profundidad de la superficie de las cosas y la profundidad de su propia superficie. Ella, pequeña, despeinada, descuidada, cineasta que viaja por el mundo, con una madre enferma y frágil, pronta a morir. Ella, un ser que no sabe cómo hay que vivir. Este libro es como una confesión en la que intenta prepararse para lo inminente. Lo inevitable.

Y lo estremecedor de aquello es que eso pasó, su madre murió y ella no supo cómo vivir, así que se fue también. Este libro se publicó en 2013 y ella se quitó la vida en 2015. Aún así es un libro con partes chispeantes y entrañables, no es lo que se imaginan, no tiene un tono de luto, lástima o autocompasión. Todo lo contrario. Si tienen la oportunidad de ver alguna de sus películas, véanla, pero vayan con otros ojos, olviden todo lo visto antes. Luego, yo recomendaría igual este libro aunque no hayan visto nada de ella, porque es precioso, pero la experiencia sin duda crecerá si ven alguna de sus películas.

[Alaíde Ventura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pequeño libro maravilloso, me agitó, todavía siento palpitaciones y algo como la intuición del llanto sin que sea propiamente el llanto (¿sabes cómo?).

No conocía el trabajo de Akerman como cineasta (de hecho, no recuerdo cómo llegué a este libro, creo que a través de la Pirateca). Hay que estar fuertes para entrarle, sugiero.

[Thom Deane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful. I’ve read this at a very important time for myself, it has made me want to solemnly ponder over all relationships I have in my life, the ones that have gone away and the ones that have kept. It’s bluntness often times leads it to sound as though the words have been organised by a computer, but in a heartfelt way, a sophisticated & enriching read.

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kurt Vonnegut for the French Girl™️

[Cathérine · Rating 4 out of 5]

4,5 *

[Seppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Een onbeschrijfelijk lijfelijke ervaring.
Gelezen na de overzichtstentoonstelling over het filmografisch werk van Akerman te zien, in de Bozar in Brussel (2024).

Een briefwisseling over Akermans liefde met haar moeder de laatste maanden voor diens overlijden. Akerman zorgt voor haar moeder en schrijft, haar moeder lacht, klaagt, leeft. Alles in een - naar mijn mening - belgicistisch aanvoelend decor van banaliteit, repetitiviteit, en alledaagse schoonheid.
Akerman wisselt mijmeringen en impressies af met stills uit haar film en foto's uit het leven van haar moeder en zichzelf. Het is duidelijk een scenarist die dit schrijft, de vertaling van medium is opmerkelijk maar passend.

De relatie met de moeder is een onweerlegbaar uniek iets, Akerman neemt je mee naar het verleden, en rumineert noodzakelijk schrijvend tijdens het uitdoven van de vlam van haar moeder. "Schrijven is het enige dat me kan redden", stelt ze het zo. Een getuigenis van liefde en en de onverbloemde tegenstrijdigheden hiervan.

Ik heb veel gevoeld tijdens het lezen, en dacht aan de finale regels uit het gedicht van Hugo Claus uit de Oostakkerse gedichten; De Moeder.

Terwijl gij elke dag te sterven staat, niet met mij
Samen, ben ik niet, ben ik niet dan in uw aarde.
In mij vergaat uw leven wentelend, gij keert
Niet naar mij terug. van u herstel ik niet.

[Xavier Roelens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Er zit iets in de manier waarop ze woorden herhaalt dat aangeeft dat ze uiteindelijk de taal niet vertrouwt om bepaalde ervaringen tot uitdrukking te brengen. Er zit jaloezie achter het kijken naar lachende gezichten. Er is het nooit ingevulde verlangen om van haar moeder te horen hoe ze het concentratiekamp overleefd heeft. Maar net zoals haar moeder daarover niet kan praten, lukt het Akerman niet om haar depressies onder woorden te brengen. Al wijst ze wel. Ze wijst het aan. En soms lacht ze zelfs terwijl ze wijst. Maar ze raakt het net niet aan. Ze schrijft over haar moeder, maar raakt haar kern net niet aan. Ze schrijft over haar zus, haar geliefdes, en blijft alleen achter. Er zit iets in de manier waarop ze woorden herhaalt dat me aan Christophe Tarkos doet denken. In haar eenvoud raakt ze me aan. In haar eenvoud laat ze me alleen achter.

[Anastasiia Mozghova · Rating 3 out of 5]

впервые за две недели захотела и смогла взяться за книгу. выбрала ту, что о распространенном человеческом опыте: семейных разногласиях, болезнях, смерти. сейчас есть ощущение, что я не могу что-либо оценивать. пока читала, было грустно, больно и спокойно. почему? потому что мы все проходим через испытания и справляемся.

[Vartika · Rating 3 out of 5]

My Mother Laughs is in quiet opposition to Chantal Akerman’s movies insofar as the act and idea of filmmaking are left entirely to the margins. However, it is understood that she figured her films on paper first (“writing,” she claims, “is the only thing that can save me”—with a close second being smoking a cigarette on the balcony), and her narrative technique across both appears to be much the same: here, as in Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and No Home Movie (the latter being the one this memoir commonly services as a companion piece), Akerman’s observations of things come to us as they are happening, as if attempting to beat time by racing against or at least alongside it. Her treatment of voices is similarly avant-garde; time and relationships collapse into each other so that one is often unsure which person is speaking or being described—there is a distinct dreamlike quality to everything amongst these pages. But in essence, it is this: Akerman home in Brussels as she cares for her dying mother Natalie, a holocaust survivor from Poland; Akerman in her head, grappling with her own unknowability alongside the shadows and silences of her family history, and occasionally with her fraught, obsessive, sometimes abusive relationship with her lover, C,—all saturated with an over-proximity, all punctuated by her mother's laughter.

Here, tedium appears a measure of love and its attendant suffering, and the quotidian brings us to a brush against the grain of the women Akerman describes, becomes. For her, affection is trailed by frustration, and a sense of being smothered and needing to get away. Everything is tinged with a sense of fragility, and this is further communicated by her interspersing the silences of her text with stills from her movies. Juxtaposed with her raw, confessional journaling, these stills take on a different meaning: they reveal themselves not as bits of her movies leaking into her private life, as many would have it, but her inner world and her relationships, not least with her mother, as something that in/formed her work. Her work is, in that sense, a reflection of her life: there is often a diktat against 'slighting' the craft of an artist's oeuvre by gleaning for the biographical in it, but it is also true that most people write from life and its discontents. With Akerman, this is often complicated by the interpretation of her movies as feminist (they may be so for us but were not for her) and the fact that she killed herself shortly after Natalie's passing. Perhaps My Mother Laughs is a suicide note, perhaps just the contemplation of it (a running theme in the book is Akerman talking about wanting to be prepared for her mother's death and for life after it, but also finding herself wanting in such a state). Maybe it is just an exercise in wanting, an exercise in life and its absolute lack of catharsis (“I read through everything I wrote and I feel very disappointed. But what can I do. I wrote it. It’s there.”). In either case, we are meant only to approach it as voyeurs, and leave it with what we may. Perhaps even a laugh, before we descend into our silences.

[Sylvia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Este es un libro raro, doloroso, cercano. Tal vez más de lo que una esperaría. La autora escribe ante la certeza de la muerte de su madre, escribe con amor y con hastío. Akerman escribe lo que recuerda y asume lo que olvida. Apela al fragmento y a descolocar tiempos y espacios para relatarnos cuándo su madre ríe y cuándo verdaderamente no.

Se me dijo: léelo con cuidado y traté de hacer caso, de veras sí.

[Marleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ongeveer elke pagina gehuild, super.

[Marte bontinck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zelfs onze schaduwen houden van elkaar als we lopen.

[Anja Drab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Čudovita, tesnobna, all over the place knjiga, ki ti ne pusti dihat. Preprost slog z enostavnimi, pogosto celo enostavčnimi povedmi daje vtis, da se o težkih temah lahko govori mimogrede, da so te teme prisotne povsod in kadarkoli, da prežemajo vsakdan avtorice, lika, s tem pa posledično postajajo tudi manj tabuizirane. Želim si, da bi jo lahko še enkrat prebrala prvič.

[Kaitlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chantal Akerman wrote these reflections in between caring for her dying mother and dealing with the fallout of romantic entanglements. This book remarkably transgresses the two shadows cast over it: a. Akerman is a celebrated avant-garde filmmaker, so many may interpret this text as a companion piece to her motion pictures, and b. Akerman died by suicide after her mother's passing in 2014, and it can be difficult for readers not to see these intimate, emotional reflections on mortality as a kind of final note.

Rather than something sweeping, the book revels in Akerman's clear-eyed candor as she reflects on the minutiae of life, the minutes of caregiving and arranging things and moving from one place to another, as well as the complicated emotions of wanting to be close to those around her while preserving a sense of her own private life and unknowability. She writes openly and movingly about tumultuous romances, as well as a constant push and pull between wanting to care for her mother until her last breath, and also turning away from her affection when it feels like all too much.

In addition to Akerman's text, the book (translated by Daniella Shreir) is framed with an introduction by Eileen Myles, an afterword by Frances Morgan, and a translator's note. These texts do a marvellous job in succinctly introducing newer audiences to the significance of Akerman's oeuvre and how her filmic insistence on exploring women's interior lives is reflected in this highly personal, and refreshingly brusque, book of hers.

I felt thoroughly plunged into someone else's life and perspective, in their sorrows and joys, and finishing the book felt like waking from a dream.

[Rebecca H.]

Chantal Akerman was a Belgian artist and film director as well as writer. Originally published in 2013, My Mother Laughs is her last book before her death in 2015. It’s a memoir about caring for her mother, a holocaust survivor, who was gravely ill at the time. Their relationship was complex, and Akerman struggles with their history and her own depression. She is trying to understand her feelings about family and her lover, C., with whom she has a fraught relationship. Akerman’s sentences are elegantly simple even as they capture depths of emotion. Accompanying the text are photographs and film stills that complement the stories Akerman tells. It’s a beautiful book, both in the writing and as an object. Anyone who has loved Akerman’s films will be interested, as well as anyone who admires honest, haunting writing about illness, care-taking, family, and love.

https://bookriot.com/2020/02/07/febru...

[james !! · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most singular & impactful books i’ve read. barely seems possible to properly articulate what this book achieves. so much pain but so much love all at once. brave, weak, charming, heartbreaking etc etc. impossible for this book to not be felt deep in your heart & stomach. it’s so expressively human, all jumbled up and at times seems incoherent to the reader which just further forces you to see & understand that this is all a very real and honest memoir, written from a place of great pain. heartbreaking but essential, one of the most impressive pieces of literature composed that i’ve read, especially due to the circumstances.

[Laurent De Maertelaer · Rating 3 out of 5]

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

[Janne De Herdt · Rating 4 out of 5]

geruststellend somber en versomberend geruststellend in haar abruptie en eerlijkheid, mistig mooi <3

[Janne · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Zodra het kind aankwam, altijd uitgeput door het volwassenenleven dat ze maar niet kon leiden, ging het op de bank liggen en sliep het een paar uur. Daarna, een beetje minder uitgeput, at het. Het kind, dat is zij, dat ben ik. En nu ben ik oud, ik word zestig. En zelfs ouder. En ik ben nog steeds op hetzelfde punt. Ik heb geen kinderen. Een oud kind krijgt geen kinderen. Wat zal me erna aan het leven binden. Zal ik kunnen leven om te slapen op te staan te eten naar bed te gaan. Ik vergat om naar de radio te luisteren. Ik luister naar de radio. Het is niet meer het moment om los te slaan.” (p.35)

[Joey Shapiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars I think but I’m rounding up because I love Chantal so so much. Definitely rambles and drifts a lot compared to her ultra-focused films, and it’s at its best when it sticks to her talking about her relationship with her mother (rather than exes and extended family, topics which sometimes just feel like tangents in between the parts about her mom). Still though, she was such a brilliant artist and her writing is always engaging (and occasionally devastating).

Definitely would make a really great companion piece to her film News From Home (and probably her last one No Home Movie, which is specifically about her mom and which I’m gonna watch tonight!!) as well as Simone de Beauvoir‘s memoir A Very Easy Death which this REALLY reminded me of the entire time I was reading it.

[hava · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eén van de mooiste boeken die ik gelezen heb. Chantal Akerman is pijnlijk eerlijk over haar leven en over de ingewikkelde, intieme relatie met haar moeder ... en ik heb alles 100% gevoeld. Hoewel ze oprecht schrijft, blijft er een soort mysterieusiteit hangen die niet vervalt in pretentie. Ze gebruikt soms kinderlijke zinnen, wat ik niet had verwacht maar wat voor mij op één of andere manier ervoor zorgde dat ik het gevoel had dat ik echt daar was, met haar. Op het einde kreeg ik tranen - ik voelde het aankomen, het was slechts een kwestie van tijd.

Ik ben van plan een aantal films van haar opnieuw te kijken nu ik dit boek eindelijk gelezen heb. Ik heb de indruk dat ik haar motieven achter haar films beter begrijp, ookal schrijft ze nauwelijks over die films. De relatie met haar moeder is nochtans sprekend over haar kunst. De verbanden met 'Jeanne Dielman ...' zijn overduidelijk. Ben natuurlijk vooral benieuwd naar 'No Home Movie', waarin een deel van dit boek tot leven komt.

'Ergens anders is het altijd beter. Dus ik doe al eeuwen niks anders dan vertrekken en weer vertrekken en terugkomen.’

[Gerasimos Evangelatos]

Η Σανταλ Ακερμαν, με αφορμή των επερχόμενο θάνατο μητέρας της (αλλά και ακόμα πιο τραγικά τον δικό της που ακολούθησε την ολοκλήρωση του βιβλίου) ρίχνει στο τραπέζι της κουζίνας θραύσματα μνήμης, φαντασίας και καθημερινότητας, αλλάζοντας διαρκώς υποκείμενα σε μια αφήγηση που, θυμίζοντας έντονα τη φιλμική της γλώσσα, θολώνει με μαεστρία τα όρια της εξιστόρησης της ζωής της μητέρας της, της ίδιας, της αδερφής, των ερωμένων της. Γυναίκες όμοιες και διαφορετικές, δεμένες, και ξένες, γυναίκες χαμένες, τραυματισμένες από την σκληρότητα της αδιαφορίας των ανδρών, πληγωμένες αλλά παραδόξως ολόκληρες περνούν από τις σελίδες του βιβλίου συνθέτοντας ένα επώδυνο αφήγημα αφοπλιστικής ειλικρίνειας.

[Hannah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mooi en grappig en verdrietig

[Lise Delabie · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5*

Heel mooie passages gelezen, maar wat een beklemmende leeservaring. Blij om na de laatste bladzijde weer in mijn eigen hoofd te landen.

[Jowix]

Ten dziennik przedżałobny sprawdza się bardziej jako kontekst do twórczości Akerman dający dostęp do jej skomplikowanego wnętrza, niż niezależne dzieło literackie. To, w jaki sposób Akerman odczuwa świat jest poruszające i smutne, ciekawie łączy się opowieść o umierającej matce z opowieścią o toksycznym związku. Ale to nadal nic wielkiego, na pewno nie imponuje formą, jest surowe, doraźne. Ale prawdziwe.

[Mack · Rating 5 out of 5]

how does one even begin to review this book? not easy to get through, and brought up a lot of feelings about my own relationship with my mother, her relationship with her mother, trauma, judaism, queerness, mental illness, the whole shebang. So worth it, highly recommend, but take your time.

[Floflyy · Rating 3 out of 5]

C'est comme lire le cahier de brouillon d'une personne que l'on connait pas vraiment, on est un peu à côté, on a l'impression qu'on pas le droit de tout lire, ça se répète, certains passages sont balancés sans réel intérêt, ça saute sans arrêt d'une relation à l'autre, d'une époque à une autre, comme si la pellicule était rayé. J'y ai vu des fulgurances que j'ai adoré, et je me suis ennuyé entre chacune d'elles.