In the midst of a pandemic, the narrator Karine Rosso—a split of the author herself—laments the growing number of homeless people who take up residence on the street corner below her window. A spectator who would like to do more, she will nevertheless remain nestled in her second-floor Montreal apartment, at the intersection of Milton and Parc streets, nourishing worry and guilt. She considers herself to be on the “front row of the social divide,” which she broadly shows the reader, gradually answering a question that seems to motivate much of her writing, but which is only clearly posed at the very end: can literature really do something in the face of the emergency, the suffering, the growing problems of homelessness? And also: is it ethically possible to write about others, to talk about their own stories? To a certain extent, yes, it would seem, since a warning tells the reader, on the first page, that “all names have been changed except those of deceased persons who can no longer tell their story.” Death or anonymity would therefore be the sesame for the authors of stories to get out of themselves and relate the reality of others.
This autofictional story is written like a letter to oneself, addressed to a “you” who is none other than the narrator. The latter justifies this choice by stating that she no longer likes to write in the “I” form, having integrated too well “the Christian humility that seeks dissolution, […] self-flagellation.” Yet this book of autofiction is deeply intimate, a reflection of a self that is anything but dissolved. It is largely about herself that the narrator speaks, beyond the distance imposed by the “ you » : we visit his friendships, his new eye disease, his daughter, his wanderings, his trip to South America years earlier.
Indeed, the youthful journey of this Quebecer with Colombian origins, during which she made and sold macramé jewelry to “tourists,” a category from which she excludes herself, occasionally slips between the fragments of her pandemic life. This travel story, taking the reader from Brazil to Mexico, initially appears as an autonomous project, but ultimately cannot be thought of without the present moment. The fragments of her past adventures nourish current reflections on the challenge of talking about others, how to do so, and how to represent them—especially when these “others” are people less privileged than oneself.
In Between the island and the turtleKarine Rosso explores the possibilities of writing about reality, about the intimate and about failure, about autofiction, about travel stories. The reader follows her through the twists and turns of her thoughts as if she were leafing through a personal diary, obviously reworked. The text thus offers a glimpse behind the scenes of the writing of professor and author Karine Rosso, into her thoughts, her aborted attempts, her hesitations about the legitimacy of her words.