La mort du père

A translation into French of a work by the twentieth-century avant-garde Italian writer Alice Ceresa.

A family gathers for the father’s funeral: the patriarch is dead, leaving the throne of the family hierarchy vacant. Yet, the survivors remain prisoners of the hollow rituals of a bygone community. In language that is at once restrained and magical—devoid of both sentimentality and autobiographical realism—Alice Ceresa lays bare the mechanisms of a timeless social reality. Dissected through her poetry, life transforms into a parody of a social prison—one from which the father’s death nonetheless signals an escape: "Then the family will finally explode," and the path will be clear for the daughters, who "will surely rule the world."