Mdeilmm

Forthcoming in June 2025.

Weaving together history, literature and personal experience, this recent book from a master of literature crafts a mesmerizing exploration of language, loss and the enduring power of the spirit world.

The strange word ‘Mdeilmm’ was reported to have been uttered by the spirit of Shakespeare when called up during a séance in 1854 at the instigation of the French poet Victor Hugo. Hugo was then living in exile on the island of Jersey where he took part in several such séances. Hélène Cixous weaves this scene into a rich tapestry that draws from many corners of her world both real and fictional: Dostoevsky’s Idiot, Hugo’s Last Day of a Condemned Man, Poe’s story ‘The Gold Bug’, but also film footage of the assassination of Itzhak Rabin and many layers of memories of her Algerian childhood. These memories are especially provoked by family archives that turn up against all odds, including her father’s obituary from an Algiers newspaper. The most curious documents are pages of transcribed communications from spirits of the departed, her father and grandfather among them. These lead Cixous’s narrator to vivid evocations of the odd couple Alice and Mr Émile who lived on the topmost floor of the house occupied below by three generations of the Cixous family in Oran. They were practising spiritualists who regularly received visits from the dead whose messages Alice faithfully wrote down. The narrator, in the end, thinks that she could become a believer.

Weaving together history, literature and personal experience, this recent book from a master of literature crafts a mesmerizing exploration of language, loss and the enduring power of the spirit world. Meanwhile, Cixous’s reader falls under the spell of the author’s incomparable ‘mole speech’, the language in which poets communicate.