She strongly captured our attention with The cliffs, finalist for the Rendez-vous du première roman prize in 2020, for which she received the Jovette-Bernier prize that same year. Virginie DeChamplain offers us Before burninga second novel which confirms his talent.
It is incandescent, burning, bewitching, the pen of Virginie DeChamplain. Both poetic and brutal, she likes to play with opposites and oxymorons. Life and death, fire and water, reality and ghostly memories, the ardent beauty of nature which shatters against the great abyssal void of those who have lost everything. None cancels the other, everything exists simultaneously.
” Everything is white. And green and black and everything is dead and alive at the same time,” says the narrator in the incipit of the novel as she observes the canopy, before continuing, a few lines later: “Nothing exists alone. Everything is found and caught up in the great movement of the seasons, each source is drowning or saving sip. I see it, the beauty here. I understand it. But it reaches me from so far away that it dissipates before reaching me. »
Is this narrator the same as that of the Cliffs ? Without a doubt. But we are here after “Les Déluges”, where the house on the cliff was swept away by immense waves, like part of the Gaspé coastline. “By the river, I think of this woman who was me and who refuses to leave, the one standing in my mother’s house, kneeling before the ghosts who loved me […], I still have wet hair from the flood, splinters that refuse to heal. »
Haunted by her memories which are superimposed on an evanescent present – the one where she fled in the company of Marco, a companion in misfortune, somewhere inland, on the outskirts of a small village and on the edge of a forest – , the narrator clings as best she can to reality, observing and noting every little detail that ever-changing nature offers her in her notebooks.
The unexpected arrival of Farah and her children, a mysterious woman also carrying a past marked by loss, which we will discover in fragments, will change the situation. Finding an echo in each other, the two women slowly become tamed, communing with the forest, a source of beauty, but also of danger, while a doe, the last representative of its species, seems to watch over them. A canary in a coal mine, it announces the inevitable end to come.
Before burning is of course marked by the climate emergency and evokes a world in disarray which is burning, flooded or dried up, marked by political instability and the disappearance of biodiversity. But above all he focuses on the waves that these turning points create in the intimate world when life, suddenly, is no longer the same. And how, on the other side of the mirror, a dried-up river can begin to bubble again.
Before burning
The People
216 pages