After In Search of New Babylon (La Peuplade, 2015), which has been translated into English and Spanish, Dominique Scali’s second novel was eagerly awaited. The author, who had chosen the American desert as the setting for her first book, responds this time to the call of the sea and the siren in Sailors can’t swim.
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
The universe of The little Mermaid, that of Andersen and not of Disney, has fascinated Dominique Scali for a long time. The great outdoors interest him, the tales too. For her second novel in seven years, she therefore invented an island located in the Atlantic, Ys, and a strong female character, Danaé Poussin, who can swim, whereas sailors, as the title suggests, can only sink. .
Danae lives in the XVIIIe century. She doesn’t have scales or fins, but her half-aquatic, half-terrestrial course will make her come across colorful characters. According to her loves and her friendships, she will alternate between a life of savior, then of shipwreck, often will take the sea, but will live especially on the shore.
The little Mermaid by Andersen is a very meaningful tale with lots of metaphors for our time, like those of the sacrifices we believe we have to make for love. I was also fascinated by the power of the ocean and our helplessness in the face of it.
Dominique Scali
Here she continues to tackle myths like that of the American dream, already covered in her first book, or the expression “When we want, we can”. His abundant novel is a story of maritime dramas and earthly joys, of will and fatality, of duality.
“I feel a certain cynicism in the face of this notion of an ideal to be achieved, accessible to all. I wanted to portray people who are subject to the instability of the sea. I realized that my writing included a lot of this idea of the double. There are two Danae in the main character, and navigation includes this duality: what allows us to get somewhere and to move forward, at sea, risks killing us. »
Marine lexicon
Dominique Scali obviously read Moby-Dick, by Melville, a host of essays and watched a number of documentaries about the oceans. This immersion allowed him to establish a lexicon and invent dialogues borrowing from old French and Quebec.
“In my research, Victor Hugo inspired me. I didn’t know it at first, but he wrote a lot of marine stuff. I started to embroider around the idea of what is old-fashioned. I used some sort of dialog code. It was a constant questioning, the language. When I saw Pierre Perrault’s films, I heard people speak with dignity. I wanted to give an immemorial aspect to the talk of the inhabitants of Ys. »
At the beginning of her story, Danae will meet a father figure and, at the end, that of a son she could have had. Between the two, his life will not be easy, whether we live on the shore or in the City that everyone dreams of. An omniscient “we” narrator also intervenes several times.
“The mythology that I invented can be interpreted in different ways. Is the “us” from the same era, is it from one ideology or another? I don’t give the answer. We discover this universe in the characters and their actions, but I needed to give some context around the story. »
Myth
Its main character somewhat escapes the myth of dreams that should be realized at all costs. She both undergoes and chooses her destiny by learning, among other things, to navigate outside her comfort zone.
“I got caught up in my research. It’s a process where the earthling in me has become a bit of a seafarer. I understood things about life by reading about the oceans. It testifies to my evolution. »
By plunging into an invented space-time, the writer “nostalgic for times she has not lived through” was able to refine her vision of ours.
“Our era is a bit of an island. We are living in a special moment that has nothing to do with what has happened in the history of humanity. I have the impression that things have been done in a certain way with institutions and fixed roles for everyone for millennia whereas today, everything is upset, moving. The feeling of superiority that one has to live now can be misleading. Progress is often to repair the damage of previous “progress”. We play the sorcerer’s apprentice with the idea of constant progress. »
Sailors can’t swim
Dominique Scali
The People
728 pages