A new English-language translation of MY MOTHER LAUGHS—Chantal Akerman’s final book—is out now from The Song Cave.

“She’s constantly saying the same thing over and over again and when I say to her you already told me that, she gets mad.

I don’t have the right to speak here anymore, I’m stopped immediately.

The next time she repeats herself I say nothing, but I sigh.

She catches it or not, I don’t know.

She says nothing and continues her taxi and airport story, about a wealthy woman who was in the hospital with cancer and a man who was in the hospital because he had fallen in his apartment at 48 years old, still in his prime. Now it will never be the same again. He was still walking and eating fine.

It rains, it rains. Yet it’s summer.” — Chantal Akerman, from My Mother Laughs, translated by Corina Copp.

Book cover image, with photograph of Chantal Akerman by Babette Mangolte, courtesy and © The Song Cave, 2019; Chantal Akerman, No Home Movie, 2015, video still, courtesy and © Icarus Films; Akerman with her mother, courtesy and © The Song Cave.