“I feel as white as a winter landscape. They failed to fully pass the colonoscope. Something was blocking his entrance at the level of the intestine. It is not a good sign […]. Tick tock. »
Tick tock. Catherine Larochelle, who we know as an actress for having seen her in Antigone by Sophie Deraspe and in the series District 31 and Leo, places this first of a series of onomatopoeias at the end of the paragraph which opens his first novel, I will go and dig up my father.
Tick tock. The countdown begins for Charlie, 29 years old almost 30, project manager in anthropology (digging up, she knows); for 10 years, blonde of Antoine whom she suspects today “of keeping in her lungs the perfume of another woman”; Karl’s sister, a plastic surgeon who has never put up with anyone other than him hurting his sister — cancer better watch out; daughter of… her mother, an actress who has a sense of drama, “even at the pharmacy, it sometimes looks like she is auditioning for a role in a tragedy”.
By the way, Charlie likes to make long lists like this. Catherine Larochelle also, one imagines, since such flights twirl nicely under her pen.
Charlie’s dad, the one in the title, in all this? He committed suicide when she was 15. Her approaching death brings her back to the drama that marked… what will prove to be the half-time of her life. She then discovers that her father did not want to be buried. He had let it be known. But his last wish was not respected. On the list of things to do before ending his stay on Earth, Charlie adds those to find his father (she does not know where he was buried) and to dig him up. “To entrust it to the wind. »
“I will go and dig up my father to entrust him to the wind”: that could have been the title of the novel. A title in two tones, like the text. The darkness of death, told here with a biting humor and there with an intoxicating lightness. The light of life, told here with poignant poetry and there with an amused rhythm that leaps from one paragraph to the next.
Charlie thus sets off on an ultimate quest, in the company of his loved ones. And… say, his father’s ghost. A journey in the first sense of the term, but also an inner journey, in which the life of the young woman parades on her way to death. Landscapes in the first sense of the term, but also interior landscapes, translated by a series of photos — not shown, but described — which open each of the chapters. Photo at 1 year before chapter 1. Photo at 2 years before chapter 2. And so on until the last photo and the (almost) last chapter. Photo at 30 before chapter 30.
The idea sounds lovely and it is, but it is more than that. It gives the text a subtle structure that beautifully anchors the story in nostalgia and love, while adding a mischievous touch. We close the book with a smile on our lips, water in our eyes. And a lump in the stomach.