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Delphine de Vigan (born 1966) is one of France's most acclaimed contemporary novelists, winner of the Prix Renaudot and Prix Goncourt des lycéens for D'après une histoire vraie. Known for her precise, emotionally penetrating prose, she excels at exploring the invisible forces that shape our lives—family bonds, memory, and the unspoken debts we carry. Les Gratitudes, published in 2019, represents de Vigan at her most tender and luminous, a brief, powerful meditation on aging, language, and the gratitude we owe to those who have shaped us. The novel was met with extraordinary critical acclaim, praised as “radiant and delicate” (Le Monde) and “devastatingly humane” (Télérama).
The story centers on Michka, an elderly woman suffering from aphasia who can no longer live alone and must enter an assisted living facility. Around her orbit two devoted figures: Marie, her young neighbor who has looked after her for years, and Jérôme, a speech therapist who tries to help her recover her vanishing words. As Michka’s language dissolves—“gratitude” becomes “merditude,” then “mercitude”—she has one burning desire: to express her thanks to the couple who hid her during the Nazi occupation, saving her life when she was just a child. Through alternating perspectives, de Vigan explores what it means to lose the words that define us, how we express what matters most when language fails, and the invisible threads of debt and devotion that connect us across generations.
Written in de Vigan’s characteristic spare, luminous prose, Les Gratitudes is a novel of remarkable emotional depth that never tips into sentimentality. It’s honest about the losses that come with aging—the slow erosion of memory, autonomy, and self—yet the tone remains surprisingly hopeful, even joyful. De Vigan shows us that even as the mind falters, human connection persists; that gratitude transcends language; that the act of caring for another is itself a form of grace. This is a book about mortality that celebrates life, about forgetting that honors memory, and about the end of things that somehow affirms their enduring value. It’s a testament to literature’s power to illuminate our common humanity with gentleness and truth.
