\nby Camille Bordas<\/span>
\nfrom\u00a0the May 20, 2019 issue of\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
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I think, without having read the entire story yet, that “The Presentation on Egypt” will also be well received. I think Bordas knows what she is doing.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t his job to explain it over and over, to sit the families down and say, \u201cThe husband\/the brother\/the son you knew is no more, it\u2019s only machines breathing for him now, and you wouldn\u2019t be letting him go, because he\u2019s already gone.\u201d He was the surgeon, not the organ-donation person, not the social worker, not a friend. His job was to say it once. Once was often enough — families would unplug a loved one within a few hours. But certain people required extra attention. TV shows he\u2019d heard of (TV shows his own wife watched) had led some to believe that desperate cases were never that desperate, that all you had to do, really, was to keep asking the surgeon, and the surgeon, because you kept him focussed and engaged in the case, would suddenly light up, go to the lab for half a day, find a solution to reverse your loved one\u2019s vegetative state, and hug you warmly at the end of it all.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n The doctor considering his role here is Paul. By the end of this short first segment, in which he tries to matter-of-factly help a grieving wife turn of her husband’s machine, Paul will have hanged himself. The story then shifts to Anna, Paul’s wife, and Danielle, Paul’s nine-year-old daughter, in the aftermath.<\/p>\n Please let us know what you thought of the story. Once I finish it, I think it’ll be time for me to seek out Bordas’s novel. Have any of you read it? If not, does this story make you want to?<\/p>\n [\/fusion_text][fusion_text columns=”” column_min_width=”” column_spacing=”” rule_style=”default” rule_size=”” rule_color=”” hide_on_mobile=”small-visibility,medium-visibility,large-visibility” class=”” id=””]<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/May-20-2019.jpg?resize=390%2C530\")
[fusion_dropcap boxed=”no” boxed_radius=”” class=”” id=”” color=”#003366″]”T[\/fusion_dropcap]he Presentation on Egypt” is the third time Camille Bordas’s fiction has appeared in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/i>. While there are several authors who appear several times, this is particularly exceptional because Bordas was writing in French until she moved to the United States in 2012. Her debut English-language novel,\u00a0How to\u00a0Behave in a Crowd<\/i>, was published in 2017, following two novels she wrote in French. For the most part, the two stories she has already published in\u00a0The New Yorker<\/em> were received well by readers here; here’s the post<\/a> for “Most Die Young,” and here is the post<\/a> for “The State of Nature.”<\/p>\n