“If there’s one thing writing can do, it’s create these moments of encounter. I write in the hope of reconciliation,” declared Yannick Marcoux in an interview with Homeworkfollowing the publication of his collection of short stories, The horizon of lighthouseslast November.
If, with this first work, he envisaged reconciliation as a step towards the other, a possible common ground for an increasingly divided Quebec, his first novel, which is arriving in bookstores these days, is much more intimate. In The island without a bridgeit is first by meeting oneself that the author proposes to bring about peace and harmony.
When Félix Laplante learns that the woman of his life is expecting a child, the immense joy that invades him threatens to be overwhelmed by the doubts, regrets and other ghosts that haunt his childhood. To welcome and accompany his son as he should, the young thirty-year-old must make peace with a dislocated past, marked by an abrupt exile.
He kisses his Sarah, determined to become a man, a father, and climbs aboard the boat that will take him to the place where he was born, one stormy day: his island, his tongues of land in which the tide deposits its secrets, its waves, both threatening and open on the infinite horizon of the world.
Yannick Marcoux does not pretend to reinvent the wheel with this story that is quite simple, from which emerge, like little treasures left by the tide, nuggets of humanity, sweetness and renewal. He writes first and foremost to do good – to himself as much as to others -, showing that it is possible, in this chaotic and terrifying present, to find in oneself the strength to calm down, to advance, to give, in life as in love, the best of oneself.
The narration follows this logic, lingering in a predictable movement, sometimes too busy, with the emotions of the characters and the contours of the island, its inhabitants and its daily life punctuated by the mood of the river. It opens up a space in which we can recognize ourselves and settle down… or get a little bored, faced with the obvious.
“It seems to me that we have done nothing all day, but it is not true, he writes. Rather, we took all the time we needed to do everything. It’s precious. We’ve turned the clock face down, it’s buzzing, but we can’t hear it. The hours are diluted in the reply of a Dali…”
The island without a bridge is like that. It requires letting go of performance or the search for meaning. The writer offers it as one offers fatherhood: he makes it a refuge, a place – similar to his island – where to forget the frantic rhythm of time to concentrate on the essential, and thus better know how to welcome what awaits us. on the other side.
Excerpt from “The Island Without a Bridge”