In 117 North, her excellent first novel published in 2016, Virginie Blanchette-Doucet spoke of Abitibi and the people who live there. If she moves far geographically away from her native region in The leaning fields, which takes place between the expanse of the Canadian Prairies and the wild nature of New Zealand, we recognize the author’s taste for the harshness of the landscapes and the silent characters. In short, we do not get the Abitibi out of the girl so easily.
In this book with poetic writing as contained as the feelings and the places explored are bubbling and grandiose, we follow several generations of beings who carry within them pain and the unspoken, carrying a heritage whose invisible weight influences them in spite of themselves. .
The story unfolds around Neil, a charismatic and angry osteopath in a relationship with the sweet Judith, their daughter Alyssia, pushed towards self-destruction by a mysterious force, her son Ivan, with an unquenched thirst for love, and a patient of Neil’s. , Leslie, who survives her past and has been something of a family for 15 years. We follow each character at different key moments in their life, not necessarily in chronological order, in fragments that reveal other links, other desires, other wounds.
Virginie Blanchette-Doucet skilfully weaves her stories that mutually illuminate and reverberate on each other until the last page, and let no thread stick out. Even if we sometimes feel a distance with the protagonists, we end up being caught up in this ambitious novel, strange and vast, which includes an element of mystery. Because their humanity is palpable, and even if they are exacerbated, the feelings explored, the parental instinct, the desire, the love, are universal.
The leaning fields
Virginie Blanchette-Doucet
boreal
310 pages