"Have you ever wondered how many times in your life you've really said thank you? A genuine thank you. Expressed your gratitude, your recognition, your debt? And to whom?"
Delphine de Vigan’s sixth novel is a slim but powerful meditation on the nature of gratitude: in the midst of countless automatic expressions of thanks, how do we express a deep and true gratitude to those whom we owe the most? To life itself? Are we cognisant of the liberation that comes with offering gratitude where it is due? And the torment that comes with leaving it too late?
As the author of the multi-award-winning, Based on a True Story, de Vigan’s reputation as a French literary sensation and queen of dark psychological family thrillers precedes her. The synopsis suggests that Gratitude will be of a similar ilk: Michka, an elderly resident of a care home is haunted by the past, terrified that time will run out before she can repay her debt.
Winter Nights
The true spirit of this novel, however, is something very different. Rather than a dark, twisty psychological thriller with shocking reveals or disturbing revelations, this is a simple human story. And one that is all the more haunting for it. As with all the best fiction, what is ordinary has been elevated to the extraordinary.
Michka suffers from aphasia, a communication disorder that affects a person’s ability to use words correctly, despite their intellectual capacity to do so. Language becomes confused and their vocabulary gradually lost. Michka would sometimes “Stop in the middle of a sentence, almost literally bumping up against something invisible. She’d look for one word but come up with another. Or else would draw a complete blank, like encountering a trap that she had to get around.”
Unwilling to become a burden to her unofficially adopted daughter Marie, Michka moves into a nursing home and tries to decelerate her condition by working with a speech therapist, Jerome. And before language is lost to her, Michka has important unfinished business from her past that she must resolve.
The legacy of childhood on the psyche of the adult is central to the novel’s narrative – both Marie and Jerome are also navigating their own personal histories in order to find a way to move forward. Despite her limited means to communicate, Michka still manages to help those determined to help her in a circle of gratitude that offers each a form of redemption.
Slow-burning thriller
In Based on a True Story, de Vigan interrogates what literature should be, and the responsibilities of an author, while also brilliantly executing a slow-burning thriller. Her previous novel, Nothing Holds Back the Night, blurred the boundaries between memoir and fiction and questioned the importance of truth in fiction. It is interesting then to see de Vigan’s philosophies extend here to the elemental importance of words: what we lose of ourselves when we lose our words and our ability to tell the story of ourselves.
The beating heart of this novel, however, is the exquisite empathy it demonstrates for the elderly and the process of aging. De Vigan captures with great sensitivity the transformation that occurs in a relationship when a child becomes the carer of their parent. The reluctant acceptance of this dynamic by them both. The awareness that time left is limited now. The loss of independence of the elder. The powerlessness of both. The forced politeness of newly discovered small talk.
Marie feels overwhelmed by the change between them: “I always end up talking to her as if she were a child and that breaks my heart, because I know what kind of woman she was.” The platitudes feel like “an insult to the woman she used to be”.
And yet Michka is not portrayed as a victim, and her true essence is vividly captured even as her corporeality declines. There is great dignity in her choices, and de Vigan still infuses her with agency despite the limitations imposed upon her circumstances. The novel articulates with poignant acuity the courage it takes to inhabit an aging body: “Losing what you’ve been given, what you’ve earned, what you’ve deserved, what you’ve fought for, what you thought was yours forever.”
Gratitude is a short novel, easily read in one sitting, but its power resonates long after. There is a gentle magnificence at work in its pages; provocative questions are asked of the reader, who cannot escape confronting their own mortality in its presence. What remains afterwards is a sense of gratitude for the experience, one that ultimately inspires appreciation anew for the time we are given.
For the words we are gifted to narrate our own stories of that time. And the spur to say thank you, while we still can.
