A journey through the devastating effects of sickness on a family, and a contemplation on all of the ways a person can be ill, Epileptic travels the dark roads of the author's past.
Author David B. recounts his childhood and young adulthood dealing with his older brother, Jean-Francois', disease, epilepsy. Diagnosed as a child in France during the late 60s, Jean-Francois' forward-thinking intellectual family hesitate to put his health into the hands of western medicine. Instead they embark on a decades long exploration of eastern, religious, and alternative medicine....each one more disppointing than the last. Initially close as children, Jean-Francois' illness slowly destroys the relationship shared with his brother, as feelings of despair, guilt, and blame pervade young David's mind, the question of Jean-Francois' involvement in his illness haunting him his entire life.
As an epileptic and a person who deals with seizures on a daily basis, I closely relate with the family's heartbreaking search for a cure. Jean-Francois' mind and eventually his body are being destroyed by his violent episodes. Over time, Jean-Francois evolves from a victim of disease, to a villain dragging his family down with him. While his mother, father, brother, and sister valiantly fight and sacrifice in order to restore his health, Jean-Francois gives up, preferring to be taken care of rather that reclaim his adult life.
While I sympathize with the family's plight, I can't say that I approve of their course of action. They fear surgery due to the cold demeanor of the hospital physicians, and so shun it as a course of action. I understand exploring options, but after a few years, and considering the progression of his disease, I find it slightly criminal that they continued seeking out alternative forms of therapy (including alchemy and magnetism) instead of simply taking the boy back to a doctor.
Meanwhile, young David's (previously Pierre-François) artistic and storytelling ability are a direct result of his immersion in fantasy to deal with the ongoing struggle of Jean-Francois' sickness. While David is attending art school as a young man, his professor calls his work "disturbing". David agrees, saying that anxiety is the main thing he wished to convey in his work. As a child he is obsessed with Atilla the Hun and other warlords, and draws armies and massacres as a way to express his growing feelings of anger and stress. He often depicts himself wearing a full suit of armor, meant to protect and shield him from the world, allowing him to turn his emotions off. The art used in the book is highly expressionistic, largely resembling wood cuts and tribal masks and imagery. Epilepsy itself is represented as a large sneering tribal serpent or dragon, which constricts and consumes Jean-Francois. Other maladies are also represented as monsters, living within the various people that the family meets. David often fears that he too is epileptic, referring to "explosions in his head". Over time however, he takes pride in suppressing these "explosions", instead of giving in to them as Jean-Francois has.
Overall, I felt that Epileptic was a bit over-long and rambling. David gives in depths backgrounds of almost all of the many, many medicinal routes his family tries. The text often slips into stream-of-conscious, including dreams and fantasies, with little or no transitions. This makes for a confusing reading experience. I feel the book was a great release for the author, a way to bury his former demons, and that perhaps it is meant more for him than for the reader. Interesting as it is, and visually stimulating, I would give Epileptic a C+ at most.
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