Strange story here. Half poetry, half grocery list, View Montauk sometimes resembles a letter, a journal, perhaps? Here is an exploded reading, certainly an exercise in style, which we guess somewhere therapeutic.
That being said, and regardless of its form, the text, signed Sophie Dora Swan, a first book by this Canadian-Swiss author, reads itself. And in one go.
We could summarize the matter as follows: a young woman, whose mother finds herself between the four white walls of a psychiatric hospital, makes him this promise to see Montauk one day. My what ? A destination about which we will not know much, in the end, except that it is near the sea, at the water’s edge, with its deckchairs, its parasols and its pressed lemonades. A destination that takes on the appearance of a lighthouse over the pages. Or buoy.
A lifesaver, in this painful daily life of the narrator, where the classic metro-work-sleep has turned into “hosto-flos-sleep”. Doubts, anxieties and tears in addition. Between psychiatric appointments and various treatments, she recounts a universe where the DSM is the “severe depression of the mother” and where tears are now drunk from the bottleneck. “Sooner or later, I will be found in the bathtub,” she bleeds. And we bleed a little with it.
The literary winks are numerous, from Fanny Britt to Simone de Beauvoir via Catherine Mavrikakis, Camus or Véronique Grenier, and serve as a pillar for a reflection on the filial bond in general, and the mother-daughter relationship in particular, plagued by illness. When this acquired, accepted and reassuring balance is completely reversed, and the daughter must be strong, because the mother is now (and forever) fragile. When the universe finally collapses.
We salute the audacity of a text that is confusing at times, carried by a pen full of poetry on a psychiatric subject that is sorely lacking in it.
View Montauk
Sophie Dora Swan
the people
168 pages