Très déçue par ce dernier livre écrit par Banks, alors que j'ai tellement aimé quelques uns de ses précédents romans. Style confus ( comme le cerveau du pauvre homme en fin de vie qui mélange et invente des souvenirs), et le sujet n'est pas vraiment intéressant ( du moins pour moi). Des questions d'éthique sont posées évidemment au travers de ce livre : est-ce qu'un cinéaste a vraiment le droit de filmer la mort d'une autre personne, jusqu'à lui mettre la caméra sous le nez. J'ai trouvé cela déplaisant, et n'ai pas réussi à entrer dans cette histoire. ( )

I found this book fascinating. A group of friends is making a documentary of the life of film maker Leonard Fife as he is dying from cancer. They want to focus on his career, but Leo ignores them and talks about his life, telling stories no one, not even his wife of 40 years, has heard. Like the first wife he divorced soon after their daughter was born. Or the second wife and child he abandoned one day. Or the fact that he wasn't, as everyone had always thought, a draft dodger. But we are left wondering how many of Leo's story is accurate as his memory is affected by his severe pain and high levels of medication. In the end, this is what the book is about: how memory and truth relate, how stories are influenced by their presentation and what our past really means. It's well written, with deep issues that need to be pondered. ( )

"What's left of his life now, who he is, is only what's inside his brain. Which is only who he was, nothing more. The future does not exist anymore, and the present never did. And no one knows who he was."

Leonard Fife is a well-regarded documentary film maker who came to Canada in 1968 allegedly as an American Vietnam war draft evader. Now in his 80's, he is suffering from terminal cancer and has left the hospital to come home to die. He has agreed to give one last interview to Malcolm, a documentarian he mentored. Malcom has come well-prepared with a list of 25 questions, and intends to explore Leo's influences and techniques and his thoughts and evaluations of his body of work. Leo has a different idea for the interview. Instead of answering questions about his work, Leo wants to make a "confession" about his life, specifically to his wife of 40 years, Emma. And it's not just the small crimes he committed, but the "mortal sins," and he wants forgiveness.

As Leo's "confession" begins, we are surprised to learn (and Leo states that Emma does not know this) that when he came to Canada in 1968 (and not as a draft dodger as widely believed) he abandoned a wife and child in America, never to be seen again. And as his confession continues we learn of other abandonments and betrayals, Leonard ploughing on despite Malcolm's efforts (at least at first) to get his questions answered. In the initial parts of the confession, I was considering abandoning the book; I did not want to read another book about a man's "mid-life crisis" (or in this case pre-mid-life crisis). But then, the reader begins to wonder, How much of this is true? And how much does Emma know?

So, what exactly is the story Leo is telling, and what exactly is only going on in his mind? It is true that he is in a weakened condition, on strong pain medications, sometimes delirious, sometimes even nodding off. Leo himself wonders what, if any, part of his story he is getting across, whether what he has said has anything to do with his memories:

"He wonders how much he was able to say to the camera this morning of what he actually remembers. He knows there is a synaptic snafu between the data received from the memory banks of his hippocampus and his prefrontal cortex that scrambled the words he is led to speak when he tried to convert that data to speech."

Further,

"He's almost two separate people, and one of them remembers in great detail a distant past and the other who does not remember anything of that past tries to describe it."

And later Emma speaks of "confabulation," which occurs when a person, often with a mental disability of some sort, fills in gaps in memory by fabrication. It is not lying; the person confabulating believes that what they are remembering is true. Emma believes that Leo's confession is mostly confabulation:

"What the doctor calls confabulation is just the way Fife sometimes tells stories, that's all, mixing memories and dreams and imagined details and meanings, embedding whatever drifts his way, exaggerating some elements and eliminating others, fooling with chronology, trying to make life more interesting and exciting than it would be otherwise...."

What Banks has created with this novel is an extended meditation on story-telling and memory, about the nature of memory, and about how we face death. It is a masterful accomplishment. I didn't understand it all, but I loved it.

First line: "Fife twists in the wheelchair and says to the woman who's pushing it, I forget why I agreed to this."

Last line: "Renee did not want to think about the death of Leonard Fife."

4 stars ( )

An old man reflects on his early life and seeks forgiveness. Semi-autobiographical. Beautifully written. ( )

Leo Fife, a renowned documentary film maker, was dying. Malcolm MacLeod, a former student of Leo's, had assembled a film crew in Leo's Montreal living room to film the final interview. Whose idea it was is a moot point; for Leo it's an opportunity to define himself and his work for posterity; for Malcolm it's a way to seal his won reputation as the designated successor.

Malcolm was ready with twenty-five prepared questions. It soon became apparent though that Leo was having none of it. Seated in his wheelchair in the darkened room, Leo started talking. Forget his film exposing the secret American testing of Agent Orange in Canada. Forget his film about the bishop caught at the Ottawa airport with a computer full of child pornography*. Leo wanted to right back to his childhood in a working class commuter town near Boston.

He was adamant that his wife Emma be in the room sitting behind him throughout. What followed was Leo's life story, recounted to the camera as a confession to his wife. He would not be dissuaded.

The pain and his memories - regardless of how befuddled and distorted they have been made by the drugs that are supposed to wage war against his cancer and mask his pain - are the only evidence he has to prove that he has not yet died. His pain and his memories confirm his ongoing existence. He needs no one to witness his pain. No one can. But his memories cannot exist unless they are heard and overheard.

Is it a betrayal of their life together? Is it true? Is Leo's life built on betrayals of friends, family, and the country he and sixty thousand others left during the Vietnam war?

Banks's writing here is visual, like a film. He does a masterful job of balancing Leo's perceived memories with his present day terminal self, and the voracious demands of the film crew. At more than eighty years of age, this may well be Banks's meditation on his own mortality. This is the tenth book of his I've read; it may well be his best.
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* Both these scenarios are true. The bishop's name has been changed in the novel.