Winner of the 2020 Governor General's Award in Translation
A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2020
Sliding doors open and close automatically, exit to the left, entrance
to the right. Beyond it, cars go by, and pedestrians and cyclists. A
large park behaves as if nothing has happened. The mirage of a world
intact.
In an instant, a life changes forever. After he falls from a scaffold on
the construction site where he works, the comatose David is visited
daily by his wife, Caroline, and their six-year-old son Bertrand--but
despite their devoted efforts, there's no crossing the ineffable divide
between consciousness and the mysterious world David now inhabits. A
moving story of love and mourning, elegantly translated by Lazer
Lederhendler, If You Hear Me asks what it means to be alive and how we
learn to accept the unacceptable.