The nights will be long and the glasses of gin, never big enough, never soothing enough. ” [C]A suicide attempt isn’t contagious/it’s not contagious, it just hurts very, very badly,” writes Carolanne Foucher in the first pages of Submersible. Just very, very badly?
Posted at 4:30 p.m.
Revealed in 2020 thanks to two and a half, the versified chronicle of an adulterated love colliding with the cramped conditions of an apartment, the actress and poet reconnects in this second book with this falsely playful tone, under which flows a river of pain. She is that girl who, on the deck of the titanic damaging herself, throwing jokes on the fly, not because she lives in denial, but because it is stronger than her.
It turns out that the titanic who gets damaged, this time, it’s her. Following the death of a friend who was not just a friend (it’s complicated), the narrator of Submersible is tormented by the sadness of a strange mourning, that of a relationship that didn’t exactly have a name. A bereavement that, in others, elicits more indifferent shrugs than compassion, even in the professionals who should be helping him. What if there was such a thing as “antibiotics for [sa] little head “.
Artisan of a narrative poetry hiding her skills under a writing that resembles everyday speech, Carolanne Foucher nevertheless manages to inflect this familiar language with a rhythm that belongs to her, combining the reassuring warmth of a conversation with a particularly comical friend to the economy of means of a storyteller who knows how to set the scene with a few key elements. Her greatest quality as an author resides in this trick, which she masters marvelously, of extracting all her emotional and literary sap from a seemingly banal detail, in which the melancholy of a precious memory has been deposited.
” [I]It feels like I’ve been naked in front of so many people/never really undressed,” his alter ego says. Yet here she is, back from the depths, in all her powerful and salutary vulnerability.
Submersible
Carolanne Foucher
Editions of Your Mother
144 pages