Review: What on earth do you say to a friend who has been threatened with death at the age of 48?

After the critically acclaimed autobiographical The end of the bees (2020), in which the French-speaking Belgian Caroline Lamarche erected a monument for her old, declining mother, death is again very close in the novella Precious moment I see you.

The Portuguese Margarida, a good friend of the narrator, has breast cancer. Her doctors decided a year ago to spare her beauty and not proceed with a mastectomy; an error of judgment with fatal consequences. The narrator of Lamarche’s poetic letter or prosaic meditation, with which Lamarche transcends genres, reports on the time in between that remains for her friend.

What on earth do you say to a friend who has been threatened with death at the age of 48? “A poem a day, Margarida, it says little/it says a lot about our friendship prisoner/of your body being consumed by the angry crab,” Lamarche writes.

Samuel Beckett

How are you doing today? Did Margarida sleep last night? How’s the pain? What lines of poetry or sounds come to mind for the friends? Has the narrator, who is a writer, written yet? How’s the weather? Blossoming flowers? Their correspondence mainly remains close to the moment, because who dares to look further ahead in this situation?

The title refers to a beautiful quote by Samuel Beckett: ‘Precious moment I see you/in this receding curtain of mist/where I no longer have to enter long floating thresholds/and I can live in the meantime of a door/that opens and closes again. ‘

Fortunately, they share a love for poetry, sound and beauty. They both draw comfort from beautiful, stylized sentences that create distance, but at the same time describe the pain flawlessly. ‘I try to say what I feel/Without thinking I feel it/says Alberto Caeiro. We too jump from feeling to saying/without the detour through thought./We experience the time of the pure story,’ writes Lamarche.

Oppressive interval

The time in between is oppressive. We long for the liberation that Margarida’s death will bring (then she can no longer die) and fear the grief that will follow. When the narrator suddenly doesn’t hear from her friend for two days, she is terrified. She won’t… will she? But Margarida, who sometimes drifts away on morphine into the great void, reappears. She sends a message, a last one, as it turns out.

Precious moment I see you is the painful story of a friend who has to let go. Perhaps the most poignant is this: ‘With you I learn to die well, some would say,/but I myself say to live well.’ Lamarche’s ode to Margarida is raw, intimate, deeply sad and comforting at the same time. By writing, she managed to keep her friend.