Les méduses par Frédérique Clémençon (review)

Escapades to the sea may represent the brackets of pleasure that interrupt the ennui of existence. Frédérique Clémençon exquisitely concocts a panoply of characters whose vie quotidienne will eventually and at times abruptly collide with sickness, catastrophe, or a numbing loss. At first glance, Les méduses may seem like a vignette of short stories told from the perspective of both adults and children relying on the care or intervention of hospitals or from the insiders—the nurses, ambulance drivers, researchers, and doctors. Yet, each story is like a molecule of an intricate, circuitous composite. Clémençon's expert storytelling stitches together a universe of pain, suffering, and redemption around a university hospital (CHU) described as "une ville dans la ville qui ne cessait de s'étendre" (62). For most, hospitals are a bracket setting—a place of births, healing, or death. They inhabit a different temporality where a few hours in the operating room are experienced as an agonizingly eternal struggle with death or a second chance at life. As readers, we have front-row seats into the inner workings, passions, hesitations, and fears of those laboring in the medical arena. For instance, a renowned physician excruciatingly doubts the precision of his surgical maneuvers, which can handicap a patient for life. The hospital also injects economic vitality into a banal western French region not too far from the Atlantic coast and south of the Loire, where birds massively congregate and fall in unison from the sky as they die mysteriously. In the declining village of Les Écluses, children are the first to witness the uncanny phenomenon. Like the birds, the sporadic invasion of jellyfish along the coast foreshadows suffering. For Hélène Laurentin (a nurse), a seaside vacation with her husband "était un séjour plein de remords, dont ces méduses avaient été la matérialisation pénible […] annonciateurs du désastre à venir" (36). Death is like an uninvited character or an inescapable destination. Olivier Peyrat, an ambulance driver, who harbors a stubborn desire for Hélène, observes that people die "comme des cons" and implies that "les morts héroïques, les morts de cinéma" (99) exist more in fiction. Pierre Milan, a doctor turned patient, wonders if a language exists that can effectively and urgently communicate why precious moments of life must be seized: "[U]ne langue dans laquelle certains mots, certaines expressions, avaient été pensés pour inclure à la fois le présent et la mort de l'avenir, pour exprimer ce qui était et ne reviendrait plus" (157)? Pierre contemplates this question as he is the only one with the luxury to choose when, where, and how he will die after learning of his brain tumor which feels like birds populating his skull: "[I]ls se déplacent, par centaines, comme si une main invisible les poussait" (148). Perhaps such a language lives somewhere. What we know is that Clémençon skillfully brings to life a world that sees itself on the periphery but is actually the heart of the human condition, punctuated by ambivalence, love, and sorrow.