French author Gilles Mercier has released one of this season's most moving literary works, a self-published book titled "The Elegance of Your Absences." The deeply personal memoir traces the author's journey to uncover his family's wartime history and confront the lasting impact of loss across generations.
Mercier describes his motivation for the project in deeply personal terms: "I lived for a long time under the motionless gaze of a few photographs modestly placed on my father's desk. In these snapshots, my grandfather Pierre appeared like a secret hero, frozen in an aura of mystery, closer to a myth than a man of flesh." He knew only fragments of his grandfather's story - that he was a military officer, resistance fighter, deportee, and ultimately consumed by Nazi fury, having died for France.
The silences surrounding his grandfather's fate had created what Mercier calls "a strange void, an absence accepted without words, but never appeased." This absence was compounded by another, more insidious one - that of his father Claude, who spent his entire life "caught up in a quest for resilience, prisoner of endless mourning."
The turning point came in 2012, following his father's death, when Mercier opened the family archives "like opening a crypt." What he found were not merely yellowed papers or forgotten faces, but "fragments of my own DNA, bloody echoes that I carried unknowingly." Through his research, he rediscovered his grandfather, Captain Roger Pierre Mercier, known by his code name "Maxime," who was killed on September 2, 1944, at the Hartheim euthanasia center.
Alongside his grandfather's story emerged the "shadows and lights" of his grandmother Fernande, her sister Madeleine, his eight-year-old aunt Michèle, and his father Claude, a five-year-old boy "left facing an abyss." Before his death, Mercier's father had entrusted him with a manuscript also titled "Maxime," which the author now realizes was "a passing of the torch" and "the last thread connecting the living to the disappeared."
Mercier describes this inheritance as both "burning and invaluable," representing "an unfinished repair that I had to take up in turn." Immersing himself in the pages, letters, and carefully documented photographs allowed him to "summon a silent assembly" and make acquaintance with those who had marked his lineage - "a soldier, a child, a bereaved woman, a wounded sister."
Through this process, Mercier came to understand "the anguish of waiting, the tearing away, the weight of uncertainty that gnaws at an entire life, the imagination of the intolerable - those dungeons, those tortures, those nights without horizon." His work became an act of invocation: "I summon my dead like calling extinct stars so that their light still crosses the night."
The author's quest extended beyond personal truth to historical documentation. He retraced his grandfather's steps "from the mountains of Puy de Dôme to the military prison of Clermont-Ferrand, from the camp at Compiègne to the wagon that rolled toward death." Each location served as both scar and witness, where he heard "muffled voices and pulses of life that, against all odds, persisted at the heart of barbarism."
Mercier positions his work as "a fragile bridge, stretched between several generations" and "an attempt to free my family from its ghosts and offer them a symbolic meeting place, far from the absences that tore them apart." By telling these stories of lives "broken but never extinguished," he offers tribute to "what in us remains intact despite the storms: our intact part of humanity."
The book is published in a 170mm x 230mm format, spanning 120 pages and weighing 380 grams, with manual binding. Swiss bookbinder Annabelle Gerin handled the binding work. More information is available on Mercier's website at www.gillesmercier.fr.
