It’s a novel populated by ghosts that teeters between a noir novel and an intimate story. An investigation more aquatic than maritime, rocked by the moving horizon of the sea, the apparent return of the same transported by memory, the wind and the sea spray.
We also discover layers of sediment where periods, people and settings overlap and sometimes mingle. Like an archeology of the senses and memory.
The narrator of Surf daythe new novel by Maylis de Kerangal, is an unnamed 49-year-old woman, an actress specializing in dubbing films or series, with a “penchant for stories”. One day in November, the body of a man was discovered on a pebble beach in Le Havre, a port city in Normandy, near the northern sea wall.
In one of his pockets, a cinema ticket (for a screening of Burn After Reading by the Coen brothers) on which we also found, written in blue ink, the narrator’s telephone number.
She is summoned the next day by the local police for this matter which concerns her, in this “ugly town” where she lived “a long time ago”, where she had not set foot in forever. Did she know this man? The sequel may not tell. Part of the truth is elsewhere, hidden under the tension, in the rhythm of the novelist’s sentences, musical and always a little obsessive.
“It’s a city where I wanted to leave,” confides Maylis de Kerangal about Le Havre, where she lived until she was 18. “After the baccalaureate, I only wanted one thing, and that was to leave her. And then, it turns out that, quite intensely, from the moment I started writing, ten years after leaving this city, it re-established itself as an immediately literary terrain. »
From time to time, it is also his home port. If it happens that the city appears here and there in her work, the writer has located two of her fictions directly there, In the rapids (2006) and Repair the living (2014). This time, in Surf dayLe Havre becomes in a way the very substance of the novel.
90% destroyed by Allied bombings between September 5 and 10, 1944, Le Havre is the largest city in France to have been ravaged by war. Both in reality and in Maylis de Kerangal’s novel, modern Le Havre thus becomes a sort of palimpsest: a city which has been rebuilt on its own ruins, where the traces of the past have been erased and must in some way be interpreted to exist, to have meaning. This is a bit like what the writer and his main character do.
A corpse lying on the pebbles
For Maylis de Kerangal, this unloved city, with a geography without memory, reconstructed and concreted, is thus the ideal canvas on which to deploy her writing. “It remains a city that everyone finds ugly,” she points out. A city which remained communist for a long time, but with a very orthodox communism. A city that was not going at all in the direction of History, during the Reagan and Thatcher era. It had this rough and very harsh side, very concrete, with also quite rotten weather. In the imagination, it is important. » And it is perhaps also, not so much to defend it as to look at it differently, why the writer constantly chooses to return to it.
“There was a time when Le Havre,” she continues, “was also a corpse lying on the ground on the pebbles. Unrecognizable, rebuilt on its ruins, with the possibility of coring and digging. For me, it resonated with what could be a bit of an archeology of oneself. »
“It’s very structuring for me, this critical zone which acts as a kind of edge, margin, border. Le Havre always seemed to me to be a fairly relegated city. By the sea, but far away, a town at the end of the rails, a bit of a terminus. »
For the author of Birth of a bridge (2010, Médicis Prize), the seaside is a living environment, of immersion and submersion, immediately linked to questions of sensoriality and desire. And for this daughter and granddaughter of sailors, born in Toulon in 1967, the sea also represents a horizon of expectation linked to absence and the promise of return.
Atmospheric novel, too, which borrows from the codes of the noir novel and takes place in a single day – like Repair the living and the Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, one of her strongest influences —, Surf day vibrates on the opaque and shady side of ports, places of trafficking of all kinds. There are also unanswered questions and silhouettes in the fog like a Modiano.
Search the ruins
If the sketch of the deceased man will upset the narrator and leave her with a feeling of déjà vu, it is rather Le Havre which is her “real” problem. She who suddenly finds herself “overwhelmed by a very old sadness”, sent back to her 16 years, to her first love story and to “the autumn of ghosting “. To this boy who left at the time without ever being heard from again and without offering any reasons. Like the city of Le Havre, the narrator also advances on several layers of intimate memory.
Writing in the first person singular, this time, responded to the writer’s desire to create what she calls “pockets of autofiction”. A word that was very far from her, she assures, being a writer usually oriented more towards the affirmation of novelistic territory. “I had great pleasure in being undetectable in these books, totally hidden. Whereas this time, I wanted to discover myself. »
Attentive to everything that pulses and vibrates, to what comes from the past and what emanates from places, she puts theGerman autumn by the journalist and writer Stig Dagerman, wandering his gaze through the rubble of the German Reich in 1946. Maylis de Kerangal superimposes very modern ruins on the passage. Irpin, Kherson, Mariupol, Bakhmut — one could just as easily say Beirut or Gaza.
Without ever seeking to “take charge of current affairs”, which is not necessarily the role of literature, she believes, the writer nevertheless wanted, in Surf day“capture a certain state of the world” by addressing current issues, such as the migration issue and drug trafficking – which has exploded in Le Havre in recent years. “This body lying on the shore also means all that. He could catalyze a lot of stories, a lot of narratives. »
And from one book to another, we also find in her this “subtle noise of prose” which attracted the Italian critic Giorgio Manganelli, he who had a weakness for books “with a thin plot and a strong theme” . Maylis de Kerangal admits to liking playing with time, using slow motions and accelerations, always attentive in her writing to the presence of breath.
“It is the very life of the text. And the way the book is punctuated, whether you like it or not, is the subject of a lot of attention on my part. » A work of art on the sentences, rare and precious, which represents a real pleasure for her.
“There is a vulnerability in the novel that touches me enormously,” also notes Maylis de Kerangal. It is an economically overpowering genre and also very fragile. But it’s a long-distance race, with moments of false flatness and moments of hollowness. For me, that’s the hardest part. »