Deník smutku

Mother was the most important figure in the life of the writer and philosopher Roland Barthes. The day after her death, on 25 October 1977, he began to keep a Diary of Mourning. He wrote it in pen, sometimes in pencil, on slips of paper (paper cut into quarters) that he needed to keep on his desk at all times. We can find references to his concurrently written work The Bright Chamber, which he was prompted to write by one of his mother's photographs, or to his dream of writing a Proustian novel, Vita Nova, in which he would make her a character. But first and foremost, this intimate documentary is a lowering of the ladder into the abyss of the last three years that he has survived.

Czech edition