ABSTRACT
Irène Schavelzon’s La Fin des choses (1988) is a sensitive portrait of a woman caught in the throes of melancholy. A happily married, fifty-year-old housewife returns home from an August vacation with her husband, glances in the hallway mirror, and finds herself still looking young. But a few days later, she starts to lose interest in the everyday routine that had been her source of happiness and security. A torpor envelops her body; at the same time, her ability to introspect and the corresponding degree of her self-awareness (though not, immediately, of her self-understanding) sharply increase. Her nerves at times seem benumbed, then suddenly grow acute, while her acts become eccentric and her thoughts turn morbid. She recalls moments from her childhood and, remembering her parents and grandmother, looks into the future toward death, toward “the end of things.” Faced as if for the first time with the coming of old age and the inevitability of death, will she lapse into profound depression, even insanity, perhaps kill herself, or in fact find the thread leading out of this self-housed labyrinth in which, in one way or another, she is about to be sacrificed? Schavelzon, who died in 2000, keeps this suspenseful question open until the last page, telling this tale of a mid-life crisis in a simple, delicately worded, precise style. Flashbacks notwithstanding, the plot moves forward with the relentlessness of a conte .
