A tight-fisted giant from the “Canadian Prairies”, Neil is thirsty and sometimes has bad alcohol. With Judith, a girl he met in Australia, he ends up in a village on the North Island of New Zealand, since “the wind sows the seeds when the earth calls them”. Thirty years later, having become a farmer and osteopath, he still lives in the antipodes with Judith, their daughter, Alyssia, and their adolescent grandson, welcoming patients in bad shape and lost sheep – like Leslie, still among them after 15 years. After a first title in 2016, 117 North (Boréal), in which she explored the landscapes of exile between Montreal and Abitibi, Virginie Blanchette-Doucet returns with The leaning fields, a second novel with an impressionistic and vague narration. A kind of drape that covers as much the dissipated writing as the thinness of family dramas in which it is very difficult to be interested. Little embodied pages, interspersed with vague protrusions on toxic parenthood.
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