The Words to Say It

I found this book compelling, as it was not only a narrative about the author’s dilemmas and strategies, but also about her treatment and survival. Her writing style is indisputably linked to what is called “ecriture” – that is post-modern French writing influenced by feminism – but it has a directness and grasp of everyday life, so often lacking in ‘survivor’ literature. It tells the truth; it does not encode it in jargon or mask it with slogans.

Ron Moule

THE WORDS TO SAY IT by Marie Cardinal, translated by Pat Goodheart, Van Vactor & Goodheart Publisher, is in the words of Bruno Bettelheim "the best account of a psychoanalysis as seen and experienced by the patient." It is the story of a healing set against the events in Algeria. Taught in over seven hundred and fifty colleges and universities as a text, and in over fifteen different departments, literature at Harvard University and in courses in medical ethics at Yale Medical School. It has received rave reviews in The London Sunday Times and the New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic and the Washington Post, among others.

According to Michael Wood "....THE WORDS TO SAY IT is a novel, not an advertisement for psychoanalysis, and the considerable virtues are literary rather than clinical. It is impeccably written.... full of the most delicate notations, recalling with great tenderness the Algeria of the narrator's childhood: fragrances, faces, sunlight, streets, rooms, a whole Mediterranean world of wind....Above all it is a book which finds the words it needs. Words can be guides too, escape routes marked on tattered old maps, and here the novel and the analysis come together since both are journeys towards a language that is sane and shared, and visibly free of the worst of the darkness."

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