You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

104 reviews for:

Mourning Diary

Roland Barthes

4.12 AVERAGE

emotional reflective sad medium-paced

O filósofo e teórico literário francês Roland Barthes teve uma morte trágica em 1980 quando foi atropelado por um carro. Ficou algumas semanas no hospital mas não resistiu. Anos atrás em 1977 sua mãe faleceu. Barthes ficou muito mal, e até o ano de 1979 escreveu um diário de luto em cartões e folhas e que vinte anos depois de sua morte foi transformado neste diário. Nele relata o seu sofrimento e saudade. Declara que a partir daquele momento ele era a sua própria mãe. Tudo lembrava a sua querida mamãe; até os filmes que assistia: " 29 de julio de 1978
(Vista una película de Hitchcock, Les amants du Capricorne)
Ingrid Bergman (era hacia 1946): no sé por qué, no se cómo decirlo, esta actriz, el cuerpo de esta actriz me conmueve, viene a tocar en mí algo que me recuerda a mamá: su tez, el color y la apariencia de su carne, sus manos tan bellas y simples, una impresión de frescura, una femineidad no-narcisista.."
Quando ia às compras também lembrava da sua mamãe ao ouvir a menina atrás do balcão dizer "Voilà" ( aqui está ) a palavra que ele usaria ao trazer algo para sua mãe enquanto cuidava dela. Cada vez mais intensa a dor é mais intensa que a última, explica Barthes: "A cada 'momento' de sofrimento, acredito que seja o mesmo em que pela primeira vez me dou conta de meu luto".

Enfim tudo era saudade e sofrimento. Tudo era uma tentativa de continuar a vida de uma maneira normal viajando, escrevendo e lendo. Mas não tinha jeito, Barthes sempre queria retornar no quartinho onde sua mãe falecera.
Este é o primeiro livro de Barthes que leio e realmente serve como introdução às suas escritas que é muito complexa. Barthes foi uma figura pioneira da teoria estruturalista, uma das escolas fundacionais do pensamento pós-guerra no Ocidente.
Gostei muito, e não vou me alongar mais.Recomendo
dark emotional sad medium-paced
emotional reflective sad fast-paced

An insightful look into the creative process, though I think I shot myself in the foot by making this my first foray into Barthes’s writing /:

“On the one hand, she wants everything, total mourning, its absolute (but then it’s not her, it’s I who is investing her with the demand for such a thing). And on the other (being then truly herself), she offers me lightness, life, as if she were still saying: “but go on, go out, have a good time . . .”

Probably the most close to heart reading about mourning. Most times it felt waaay too close to home, almost like it was me who wrote this journal and now am rereading it. Mourning a mother is a process only the ones who live it can describe it.
emotional reflective sad

The day after his mother died, Roland Barthes started writing in his diary about his grief. Two years later, he passed away, after having been hit by a laundry van while he was walking on the streets of Paris. So the book, assembled and published after his death by his translator, is not a finished product but the "hypothesis of a book desired by him." It contains bright points of observations and thoughts that, had Barthes been alive, would have been expanded and explored futher. What one gets is a catalog of his days, the nature of his suffering, the ebb and flow of grief, the gap between his interiority and exteriority, and modes of externalisation of grief in a society. Barthes lives in the midst of grieing; he grieves in the midst of living. In this way, the discontinuous character of the Mourning Diary mimics the discontinuous character of grief. 

Suffering is a form of egoism, Barthes writes in his diary. One is loyal to one's suffering; one luxuriates in the symptoms, so to speak. His suffering is the object of his attention. The relationship with his mother, then, is associative. As she and the fact of her death recedes into the past, his grief keeps his mother at the forefront of his mind. 

Barthes doesn't want to manifest mourning; he doesn't want to hystericize his grief. One of the paradoxes of grief lies in the fact that his inability/unwillingness to hystericize his grief makes people think "I'm suffering less than they would have imagined." Because he has gone onto to live, teach, travel, take notes, he suspects his grief hasn't been intense enough to disrupt his life. He finds no depth in his grief, he writes. Even the depths of his grief are shallow. There are only layers of surface. What he discovers, in grief, is the gradient of effect. 

The book feels jarring, unfinished. But that is probably the nature of grief.  It is not a chore, a task, to be done with. One is never finished with it. For Barthes, "mourning is immbile, not subject to a process." It is fitting, then, that, like grief, the book doesn't feel narrativized. 
emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Valutare un diario di un lutto ha sempre un non so che di strano (anche di ridicolo forse). Un diario iniziato all’indomani della morte della madre di Roland Barthes, un diario composto di frammenti di dolore. Non so se l’autore volesse davvero che queste pagine fossero pubblicate, è tra le cose più intime che abbia mai letto, la nudità dell’anima su carta…da una parte sono contenta di averlo letto, dall’altra sento di aver profanato un momento ai limiti del sacro.