Black Forest by Valérie Mréjen

Valérie Mr éjen's Black Forest is a grieving novel that is neither dark nor emotional, but rather an exquisite and wryly comic brace against the blank. Mr éjen pursues death's terrible and twisted journey through the lives it touches with a bizarrely detached closeness, drawing out every conceivable meaning—or non–meaning—along the way.

Valérie Mréjen, a writer and director, writes about a sequence of bizarre deaths in this tiny collection, writing about loss and sadness in detached but nevertheless very genuine ways. When a divorced father and his children go to his ex-apartment wife's to pick up clothing, they discover her body in bed. Mréjen sprinkles in little vignettes of death as the elder daughter grows older and surpasses her mother's age of death, and as she dreams, recalls, and wonders, he tries to acquire a sense of what death is like, at its broadest and yet most zoomed in.

Translated by Katie Shiren Assef

Link to read: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/42999446