Her first novel, In Search of New Babylon (La Peuplade, 2015), a sort of literary UFO that revisited the codes of the American Far West at the end of the 19the century, had quickly won over the critics. A few singular characters linked escapes, lies and towns, small or large, in pursuit of their own demons.
Seven years later, with just as much imagination and the same remarkable mastery, Dominique Scali is doing the splits. Sailors don’t know to swimhis second novel, has more than 700 pages and immerses us in a kind of XVIIIe “alternative” century, on Ys, an island not at all heavenly lost in the middle of the North Atlantic, equidistant from Europe and America.
An ambitious adventure novel, a fake historical novel in a maritime and political utopia way, where two classes of islanders rub shoulders under the spray, looking at each other like faience dogs: the inhabitants of the City and the others, the “residents”, the left behind born “on the wrong side of the wall”, at the mercy of the high tides that hit the island twice a year.
Seven years ? Might as well say an eternity, in our age of attention deficit and instantaneous reactions. “I don’t mind being forgotten! laughs Dominique Scali, who writes first and foremost, she explains, to tame the obsessions that inhabit her. “I preferred to take the time to come up with something that is finished. »
Over forty years, Sailors can’t swim takes us in the wake of Danae Berrubé-Portanguen, known as Poussin. An orphan who, something rare on this rock surrounded by cold water, knows how to swim and does not hesitate to use her “gift” to come to the rescue of shipwrecked people or to loot the wrecks of the many ships that have crashed on the reefs that surround the island and its “too rugged contours”.
“If I try to go back to the origin of this story, it is when I realized that I only cried when I was in my bath. It was a bit like water returning to water, says the writer. This is the very first image. It was also a period, remembers the writer, when she was fascinated by The little Mermaid, the tale of the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. “A fair enough fable of the sacrifices we are ready to make for love and for success. »
A purely imaginary fascination
This ambitious novel being born of a purely imaginary fascination, the writer born in Montreal in 1984 says that she “started from zero” as far as her knowledge of the maritime universe is concerned. “I read, I read, I read. In particular, she drew on the romantic side of images associated with the ocean in Victor Hugo. But also with Roger Vercel, a writer of the Breton sea who brought life through his work to the sailors and fishermen of his corner of France. It allowed Dominique Scali to understand what it was to “think like a sailor”. While each of the characters she puts in her novels, she assures, is also a part of herself.
The novelist, who describes herself as a “History tripper”, also admits that the research stage is always at the heart of her pleasure in writing. A “professional deformation”, admits this journalist working for the Montreal Journalwho particularly likes the stage of gathering information.
On Ys, several of the characters will hesitate between the “tyrannical, highly codified world of the City and the free savagery of the shore”. The theme of duality, recognizes the writer, is central: land and water, power and impotence. “The novel was also born at a time when I realized that it was possible to be extremely happy and extremely unhappy at the same time,” she adds.
Time and environment oblige, the female characters of this great story with a rather “circular” narration do not have the most beautiful roles: prostitutes, pilferers, stepmothers, Yssoise concubines without citizenship, even figureheads sculpted with before ships. “We understand that at Ys, men and women are not equal, recognizes Dominique Scali. I think I wanted to put myself in the place of the powerless on this island, in particular in the place of the residents, but also of women in general. Because even in the City, we understand that it is not easy. »
Write to satisfy the reader in oneself
As with her first novel, the novelist has composed a harsh and uncompromising universe. Like the men and women who survive clinging to this island, the geography and climate are unforgiving. “The first spark, I’ll come back to it, it was a bit The little Mermaid [d’Andersen]. This image of the woman who is on the margins, a little excluded, and who dreams of going to this other world which is inaccessible to her. This is the reason why I have, if you will, populated my novel with metaphorical sirens, even if there is no fishtail, she adds. But it’s full of women trying to access this other world that is denied to them and for which they have to make a lot of sacrifices. »
Dominique Scali made the choice – eminently literary, artistic – to make the language adhere to the subject and to his time. The result is a kind of particularly well-oiled amalgam, made up of Old Regime twists and the sparkling verve that animates some of Pierre Perrault’s documentaries. She says that she was struck, during the work, by the “dignity” with which the fabulous storytellers of L’Isle-aux-Coudres expressed themselves captured by the author of All Isles.
“Sometimes, she continues, I have the impression that our time is an island. For millennia, things continued. People were born and already had a role given to them, expectations they had to fulfill, kings and emperors ruled us, and no one questioned that. Our time is very different from those that preceded us, everything is possible, even if there is a certain loss of bearings that sometimes comes with that. »
“I have the impression that my driving force is very much my obsessions, my trips imaginary. There is even a kind of frustration too: there is a moment when I am frustrated at not finding the book I would like to read. The more it grows, the more it becomes clear and the more the answer becomes: it’s because the book doesn’t exist and you have to write it. It’s a bit as if the writer, she confides, came to satisfy the reader. »