Marina Baskakova read Daniel Pennack’s book Diary of a Body for us.
“The title is intriguing, but the content can actually be shocking, as the synopsis warns us. At least for a reader who finds it difficult to admit to himself: he has repeatedly encountered intimate experiences similar to those experienced by the hero of the book – first a growing up boy, and then a gradually aging man.
Pennak found a brilliant move: his hero does not keep a personal diary, but, as it were, a diary about the life of his body. He talks about the sensations, desires and fantasies associated with the body, and thus actually gets to know himself.
The book begins with an episode of humiliation of the 12-year-old hero by his peers. He is tied to a tree and left alone. Strong fear causes “shameful” physiological reactions. And at that moment he realizes that his own body is beyond his control. But oddly enough, such a “fall” in the eyes of others and in his own makes the boy become attentive to what usually lives in the backyard of our consciousness – to his own body.
Daniel Pennac, a French writer, worked for many years as a literature teacher at a school in a suburb of Paris. His books have been translated into 26 languages, and his essay “Like a Novel” (Samokat, 2013) has turned the notion of how literature should be taught so that children want to read.
“Diary of a Body”
Translated from French by Serafima Vasilyeva.
Eksmo, 416 p.
Indeed, how many of us remember this sensual diversity of the world: smells, sounds, unexpected taste, the pleasure of touching objects and substances of different textures that are open to the child? This brightness of perception of the world, the power of direct impression gradually fades and turns into abstract knowledge. And here is the form of the diary, which the hero chooses, allows you to be more attentive to the changes that occur with the body and, ultimately, with the soul. The body turns out to be such an object that helps the hero to establish his identity, to return parts of the personality that were alienated as a result of upbringing and due to other life circumstances.
Reading the Diary is a good opportunity to remember (or discover) that the social plane of life and the existential are inseparable, intertwined in a multicolored pattern, that every movement of the soul causes an inevitable response in the life of the body. Moreover, if bodily manifestations are not filled with deep spiritual content, they are meaningless and cause rejection. For example, such bodily manifestations as caresses (in this case, in relation to the child). Compare: caresses that come simply from tenderness, and caresses with which we are trying to stop crying. Great difference!
Reading this book, filled with physiological details, is not easy. And here it is worth recalling one of the provisions of the Declaration of the Rights of the Reader, which was composed by Pennak: you can not read the book to the end, you can skip and have the right to remain silent about what you have read. Or (I will add from myself) return to it at the moment when you want. It’s like looking at your own photos – after all, we ourselves choose the period of our life that is especially close to us now.