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casparb's review against another edition
barthes I always find a sweetie ; he's a rare critical theorist in being a warm & trusting person. I first read him years ago in school because I wanted to know what literary theory was like & immediately I was knee-deep in essays about washing up powders, einstein's brain, how romans look in the movies, supersonic jets. I remember reading Camera Lucida, - which is heavily related to the mourning diary - in my little dark room at the end of 2020. Lucida begins as an essay on photographic theory, but transforms into a kind of elegy-essay, a cri de coeur following the death of RB's mother. Barthes was hit by a van & died only a couple months after its publication.
So this book, the mourning diary, isn't a Book of Theory. It's quite literally a diary, consisting of notes from the two or three years after his mother's death, beginning on the day itself. A kind of autoanalysis, a self-diagnosis (though that term has sprouted other connotations. There are two kinds maybe). so this is HEAVy stuff, as per, it's me, ,, and I like it a lot. I'm to sit with it since I'm not about to process three years worth like this, just as with denise riley writing years after her son's death. but because this is a review site I think 1) it's good 2)these are very sharp observations 3) they ride a line between the barthesian theory-brain and the more Lewisean emotive-brain 4) that is a good thing I think it is refreshing 5) transmission of death from an event to a duration is really just the move, the business, what can care for the rest
So this book, the mourning diary, isn't a Book of Theory. It's quite literally a diary, consisting of notes from the two or three years after his mother's death, beginning on the day itself. A kind of autoanalysis, a self-diagnosis (though that term has sprouted other connotations. There are two kinds maybe). so this is HEAVy stuff, as per, it's me, ,, and I like it a lot. I'm to sit with it since I'm not about to process three years worth like this, just as with denise riley writing years after her son's death. but because this is a review site I think 1) it's good 2)these are very sharp observations 3) they ride a line between the barthesian theory-brain and the more Lewisean emotive-brain 4) that is a good thing I think it is refreshing 5) transmission of death from an event to a duration is really just the move, the business, what can care for the rest
jasoncomely's review against another edition
3.0
I didn't connect with this emotionally, although there were some profound entries.
cclift1114's review against another edition
5.0
In the days after the death of his mother, Barthes began writing short notes and observations about his mourning and suffering. These have been compiled here and are so intimate and revealing. It was cathartic to be able to recognize my feelings after the death of my own mother in what Barthes wrote, to know that others have felt similarly as I have. He so well encapsulates the suffering, doubt, feeling of overwhelming, isolation, reflection, introspection, numbness and fear that accompany the loss of someone beloved and integral to your life. Highly recommend for those having dealt with such a loss.
briandice's review against another edition
5.0
2013 is the ten year anniversary of my mother’s death.
Pre-dawn, Las Vegas, August 17. “I’m sorry to wake you,” my sister’s voice through the receiver, “but Mom died last night.”
C.S. Lewis: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Barthes conjures words wrenched from suffering. A day’s events are distilled and filtered through the lens of loss. Every ache, an intensity that wounds anew. Barthes: At each “moment” of suffering, I believe it to be the very one in which for the first time I realize my mourning.
I went to bed late the night of August 16th, smug from having won $4,000 playing blackjack. I envision the specter of time tapping me on the shoulder as I laid my head upon the hotel pillow and whispering in my ear, “You will use that money to bury your mother.”
Barthes: As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.). August 18 – 22 in Houston. Our family room is filled with every chair in the house to accommodate visitors. Everyone looks and acts like they are in a play in which everyone has forgotten their lines. My father offers people food, cooked and delivered by other people. I give a dirty look to anyone who unwittingly sits in Shirley’s favorite chair.
November, 2004, a year after Shirley’s death. I am home for Thanksgiving, the second without her. My childhood home has become a Shirley museum. A year after her death and everything is exactly as it was the day before she died. Her medicine bottles sit bedside, clothes in the closet, recipe book open on the counter. I expect to see her walk into the room at any moment. I am the only family member that seems to be bothered. This is the last time I will spend the night in this house, the last holiday celebrated.
Barthes: The most painful point at the most abstract moment…
The family is in the hearse heading to the grave for the ceremony, leading the long line of mourners. Police tag-team the stoplights; we avoid all traffic. I laugh, actually laugh, thinking of Dennis Miller’s joke: “It is a cruel irony that we spend our whole lives waiting at stoplights, and when we die, we don’t have to stop at them. ‘Well, I’m dead, but I’m making good time!’” I cover my chuckle, turn it into a sob. No one notices.
Barthes: Don’t say Mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
Holiday season, 2012. I call my sister and say, “Doesn’t it bother you that ten years after mom’s death she still doesn’t have a headstone?” She agrees with me, says it is time we get her one. We have both tiptoed around this issue with our father, but I can’t take it anymore. I imagine people scouting the graveyard for a nice plot, see the unmarked area, inquire and find that it contains an interred beloved. So beloved that they didn’t bother to give her a grave marker. I call my father, tell him we are getting a headstone. “I’ll do it,” he says, defeated. “It just has always felt that to do so would make everything … so final.”
Barthes: To see with horror as quite simply possible the moment when the memory of those words she spoke to me would no longer make me cry.
It’s been ten years, Shirley. I have a daughter you’ve never met. I am married to a different woman. Would you even recognize me?
Pre-dawn, Las Vegas, August 17. “I’m sorry to wake you,” my sister’s voice through the receiver, “but Mom died last night.”
C.S. Lewis: No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
Barthes conjures words wrenched from suffering. A day’s events are distilled and filtered through the lens of loss. Every ache, an intensity that wounds anew. Barthes: At each “moment” of suffering, I believe it to be the very one in which for the first time I realize my mourning.
I went to bed late the night of August 16th, smug from having won $4,000 playing blackjack. I envision the specter of time tapping me on the shoulder as I laid my head upon the hotel pillow and whispering in my ear, “You will use that money to bury your mother.”
Barthes: As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.). August 18 – 22 in Houston. Our family room is filled with every chair in the house to accommodate visitors. Everyone looks and acts like they are in a play in which everyone has forgotten their lines. My father offers people food, cooked and delivered by other people. I give a dirty look to anyone who unwittingly sits in Shirley’s favorite chair.
November, 2004, a year after Shirley’s death. I am home for Thanksgiving, the second without her. My childhood home has become a Shirley museum. A year after her death and everything is exactly as it was the day before she died. Her medicine bottles sit bedside, clothes in the closet, recipe book open on the counter. I expect to see her walk into the room at any moment. I am the only family member that seems to be bothered. This is the last time I will spend the night in this house, the last holiday celebrated.
Barthes: The most painful point at the most abstract moment…
The family is in the hearse heading to the grave for the ceremony, leading the long line of mourners. Police tag-team the stoplights; we avoid all traffic. I laugh, actually laugh, thinking of Dennis Miller’s joke: “It is a cruel irony that we spend our whole lives waiting at stoplights, and when we die, we don’t have to stop at them. ‘Well, I’m dead, but I’m making good time!’” I cover my chuckle, turn it into a sob. No one notices.
Barthes: Don’t say Mourning. It’s too psychoanalytic. I’m not mourning. I’m suffering.
Holiday season, 2012. I call my sister and say, “Doesn’t it bother you that ten years after mom’s death she still doesn’t have a headstone?” She agrees with me, says it is time we get her one. We have both tiptoed around this issue with our father, but I can’t take it anymore. I imagine people scouting the graveyard for a nice plot, see the unmarked area, inquire and find that it contains an interred beloved. So beloved that they didn’t bother to give her a grave marker. I call my father, tell him we are getting a headstone. “I’ll do it,” he says, defeated. “It just has always felt that to do so would make everything … so final.”
Barthes: To see with horror as quite simply possible the moment when the memory of those words she spoke to me would no longer make me cry.
It’s been ten years, Shirley. I have a daughter you’ve never met. I am married to a different woman. Would you even recognize me?
lesleynr's review against another edition
4.0
Barthes recorded his experience of mourning on little slips of paper over the two years following his mother's death. He expressed so many things exactly as I've thought them -- the existential shock of her sudden nonexistence, the confusion over the present tense, the fear of the catastophe that has already happened and CANNOT happen again, the confusion of finality in the midst of your own numbing, ongoing-ness, the agony and guilt of symbolic rebirth, the sudden marking of before and after, and what once was is never more, and what once could be is never the same. But I envy his ability to feel. These jarring mind states have often kept me from feeling... though I won't say I haven't suffered. In this, too, I identify with his own clarification that mourning isn't even really a process -- it's the effects of a suffering, a continued, renewed experience of awakening over and over again to something completely incomprehensible. There it is. Again.