“It was in Niagara that I contracted the disease of death at three years old and I have never recovered from it”, writes Catherine Mavrikakis in a new novel which sheds light on all of her work, whose death has always been the main character and for whom his only shadow annihilates any possibility of serenity.
Posted yesterday at 5:30 p.m.
In 1964, Catherine Mavrikakis’ father took a photo of his wife and daughter at Niagara Falls, where they often stopped en route to Catherine’s aunt’s residence in Gary, Indiana. This slide, the very image of a happiness that cannot last, becomes, in the present, the piece of wire on which the writer pulls.
“In 1964, when, in front of the falls, my father took a photo of her and me, I felt that I could lose her, she recalls. At that moment, I knew that nothing, no, nothing could save us from this rush of time which would never stop its course, from this descent into hell that life would be. More than 50 years later, the daughter accompanies the body of her dead mother as it crosses the continent and drifts down the St. Lawrence River to the Gulf of Mexico, a long and strange funeral procession through a setting populated by ghosts.
Novelist of existential angst, sarcasm and darkness, where thinking of the worst is as much an affliction as a hygiene, Catherine Mavrikakis signed last year with Impromptu a short and caustic text, throwing an instructive light on its relationship to teaching and literature. niagara follows the same line, less in its tone, here more solemn than corrosive, than in that it goes back to the root of this obsession with death that lines his work.
niagara can thus be read as a sort of – fascinating – addendum to some of his most important books (in particular Omaha Beach and Bay City sky). The symbol that Niagara Falls has become perfectly sums up the writer’s favorite posture, she who is never more at home than when she stands at the edge of the void, obsessed with the precipice.
But death, in the author of Smokey Nelson’s Last Days, is never just an inherent inevitability of existence, but also the foundations—500 years of violence and bloodshed—on which America was built. Revolted by the levity and kitsch with which this story of suffering and exploitation is still told, she remembers having visited in Louisiana, in 1968, a plantation transformed into a tourist place, where the summer visitors were “already all ready to play the Southern gentlemen-farmers”.
Digressive book with a tone borrowing a lot from the essay — “Is it really a novel? I see myself more as a documentary writer, a geographer of American territory. niagara crosses paths with Jeff Buckley, Ivan Doroschuk (Men Without Hats), Joyce Carol Oates and Josephine Baker, who all in turn become the bereaved’s companions in despair. Despair which, in Catherine Mavrikakis, is the most acute form of lucidity.
niagara
Catherine Mavrikakis
Heliotrope
180 pages