Chloé Delaume

Eden, matin, midi et soir

Eden, Morning, Noon and Night

March 1, 2009

Theater

48 pages

150 × 200 mm

10 €

265-0-0200-2705-1

Art cover and illustrations by François Alary

Chloé Delaume, Eden, matin, midi et soir

Thanatopathy [tanatopati] n.—from the Greek thanatos, death, and pathos, that from which one suffers. This is how Adele named the illness that gnaws at her, an illness that makes her unfit for life. For fifty minutes, she explores every corner of her pathology, with the humor of those beyond despair. Fifty minutes is the average time between two suicides in France.

Written for the actress Anne Steffens, this monologue was directed by Hauke Lanz during its creation in 2009 at the Ménagerie de Verre, as part of the Étrange Cargo Festival.
A radio adaptation, directed by Alexandre Plank the following year, was broadcast on France Culture several times.
Anne Steffens and Chloé Delaume then presented this text in a performative form, notably at FRAC Lorraine in 2011.

The author

Chloé Delaume was born in 1973. She has been writing in many forms and media since the late 1990s. She has written nearly thirty books as if they were experiments: novels, poetic fragments, plays, essays, self-fiction. She is fond of hybrid objects and the mixing of genres: a novel illustrated by a video game (Corpus Simsi), the hijacking of a board game (Certainement pas), fan fiction in which you are the hero (La nuit je suis Buffy Summers). But also diary of a home performance (J’habite dans la télévision), dystopia (Les sorcières de la République). If her first novel, Les mouflettes d’Atropos, was tinged with radical feminism, she later focused on the issue of sisterhood by publishing Mes bien chères sœurs and the collective work Sororité.
Winner of the Prix Décembre 2001 for Le cri du sablier, she was a resident at the Villa Médicis in 2010-2011 and won the Prix Médicis 2020 with Le cœur synthétique.