![]() And then Jean-Christophe developed epilepsy, aged 11.Īnyone who has suffered from epilepsy, who has a family member who has suffered from epilepsy, or who knows anything about serious illness will be familiar with what happens next: the long torturous dance of doctors, quacks, counsellors and healers. ![]() Their parents were good people, teachers, who read their children bedtime stories and went to Mass on Sundays. On the last page of the book David B addresses his brother and writes, "My face would be yours".ĭavid B (real name Pierre-Francois Beauchard), his brother Jean-Christophe and their sister Florence, grew up in Orléans in the late 1960s. The two brothers are locked in combat with each other, and each with their own epic, domestic battles against despair. Hailed as a masterpiece in France, where it was published in six volumes under the title L'Ascension du Haut Mal, Epileptic is a graphic novel, or more properly a graphic autobiography, a book both about the author's brother and his decades-long struggle against epilepsy, and about David B's own long struggle to become a writer and artist. As a work of evisceration, as a ripping and widening of the soul, and as an honest appeal to the self and to the great, yawning emptiness that you might call God, or you might call the Other, or you might indeed call the Reader, there shall probably be no more profound a work published this year than David B's Epileptic. ![]()
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