Palliative Images in Marion Coutts's The Iceberg and Marco Peano's L'invenzione della madre.

Abstract

This article explores the representation of terminal brain cancer in Marion Coutts's memoir The Iceberg (2014), on her husband's illness and death, and Marco Peano's autofiction L'invenzione della madre (The invention of the mother; 2015), about a son who cares for his mother during her final days. While addressing the medicalization of dying and the efficacy of palliative care, both texts engage pervasively with visual culture. This emphasis on the visual arts and cinema provides a thought-provoking commentary on the protagonists' experience of witnessing the gradual erosion of verbal expression in their dying loved ones. This essay will thus explore both the use of visual culture as palliative praxis and the authors' implicit considerations on the role of narrativity in dying.