Bernard Lamarche-Vadel: The Father's Curse in Literature

In Bernard Lamarche-Vadel's third novel, "Sa vie, son œuvre," the character Doctor Marbach attempts to reinvent the role of Bossuet's funeral orations, which contemporary society has deemed grotesque. Marbach aspires to be a mediator capable, through carefully crafted sentences, of reintroducing life into death and vice versa using only words. However, the book itself is a ghostly entity, existing only as it is negated by the very movement of the text that bears its title. The critical apparatus—prefaces, correspondence, revisions, and testimonies—intertwine, presenting the hero as alternately dead and alive.