BOOK: Son Frère by Philippe Besson

Title: Son Frère (Zijn Broer/His Brother)
Author: Philippe Besson
Genre: Family
Publisher: Editions Julliard/Anthoc
Pages: Hardcover 149
Language:French. Read in Dutch.
Rating: 7/10
Summary: Lucas's younger brother Thomas, 26, is dying. After months of hospital procedures, the two brothers spent Thomas's final days together in their family's old holiday home.

"My brother is dying"
While doctors try to figure out why Thomas's blood platelet count has suddenly fallen (they keep emphasizing it's not AIDS) and he is put through test after test, Lucas watches Thomas suffer in silent agony. He notes the friends falling away from him, including his girlfriend Claire (Lucas's lover, Vincent, deserts him as well for spending so much time with his brother). Clear-eyed and unflinching, Lucas records the visits of their parents, whose own grief becomes selfish and crippling.
When the doctors finally give up on Thomas, Lucas accompanies him to the island where they spent a lot of their childhood. There, they regularly encounter an old man on the beach whose own life is "littered with corpses." Thomas has a theory that his illness is a kind of reckoning, and the old man's edict that "you don't defy the will of the ocean" at last allows him to face his death.

I'm not sure if this book is autobiografical, but it does feel like it. The story is written like a diary, although it does switch between the time in the hospital and present-day scenes. Even though it is about Thomas, it also tells us a lot about Lucas. It's obvious he loves his brother very much, but as it turns out he doesn't know him as well as he thought.
Despite all the time they spent together in the hospital and on the island, it's not as much through conversations as through observations that we get to know both brothers and their history.

I absolutely loved Besson's first novel, In The Absence Of Men, but this book is also recommended.