A book is often born out of very little. A memory, a fixed idea, a trauma, an image. Here, everything starts from the obsession of the narrator for an old photo, showing her father, now deceased, in the company of a few people she does not know and to whom he seemed close.
In this way, she intends to thwart fate and get closer to her father, a Frenchman who arrived in Montreal with eighty dollars in his pocket, who had disappeared four years earlier. She will make him her character and her interlocutor.
Haunted by this photo, Jane, the narrator ofA postcard from the oceanthe sixth novel by Stéfani Meunier (The stranger, We never come home, Boréal, 2005 and 2013), will investigate. This photo bothers her, she would like to know who these strangers were who perhaps still have a little piece of him.
Asked about the photo, his mother told him that these people were his father’s colleagues at the Berlitz language school where he worked. Robert and Joyce, Europeans who had known each other by correspondence before coming to settle in Montreal. Jean Moretti, alcoholic seducer saved by a lake in Abitibi, today “almost happy”. Or Diane Wilcox, who has become a painter.
“I had a magical childhood,” admits Jane. In a time of comparisons, profits and losses, Jane, a writer and mother of two children — “a difficult teenager and an anxious little girl” — feels that her reality today does not make the weight. “A childhood of smells, colors, music that I have not succeeded in recreating for my children, a childhood in another dimension that I no longer find. »
Do not expect major revelations at the end of this rather jumbled investigation, without narrative tension, where Jane is content above all to bombard her own life and the ghost of her deceased father with questions.
His daily life, it is true, brings his own insufficiency back to his face. An “invisible wound” that has always made him feel insecure and lack confidence. “I don’t know how to do it. I am forty-five years old and my house looks like the apartment of a sixteen-year-old girl who has inherited custody from her younger siblings. »
And when she tries to write, she has to realize that death “comes to the surface like fat on a soup that gets cold”. Which does not prevent him from being afraid of it. “It is surely this fear that makes me write novels that are too short and that take up too much of my time, that I am never in a hurry to finish since each word brings me closer to the end. »
But how do you belong, as the mother of two difficult children, as the daughter of a father whose mourning continues, or as a writer who has to steal time from daily business? It’s one more season in a life that consists of “finding useless solutions to insoluble problems”.
Do not expect major revelations at the end of this rather jumbled investigation, without narrative tension, where Jane is content above all to bombard her own life and the ghost of her deceased father with questions.
In his own way, tinkering with nostalgic stories full of humanity, Stéfani Meunier plugs into the ordinary of life. An ordinary capable of both feeding and devouring us, made up of invisible links despite absences.