A review by fully_booked_93
Mourning Diary by Roland Barthes

emotional reflective sad

4.0

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.