Roman Bladou | Write in the crashing waves

The ocean is never far away North Atlantic, the first sublime, airy and contemplative novel by Romane Bladou, a visual artist and photographer based in Vancouver. We spoke to him during his visit to Montreal this week, on his way to the Salon du livre de Québec.

“Sometimes we pretend to look at the landscape to catch our breath; sometimes, we pretend to catch our breath to look at the landscape,” writes Romane Bladou.

These breathtaking landscapes, she sought them out and photographed them in Newfoundland, Scotland, Iceland and Brittany. “I started writing about all those times I wanted to take a picture and didn’t have [mon appareil] with me, she said. To remember it. »

But there are also all these sensations and emotions that the proximity of the ocean and its raging waves give rise to, which did not find their place in the images.

In these notes scribbled on the trip, she therefore began by describing the cold, the wind on her skin. “I kind of created characters to serve the places,” she adds. Places chosen for the beauty of their landscapes, their steep cliffs and this impression of the end of the world that emanates from them.

North Atlantic actually tells of four locations linked to four characters. First there is Camille, who works in a café in Port Rexton, Newfoundland. Who wonders what she’s still doing there, since even the whales are gone. On the Isle of Mull, in Scotland, where Romane Bladou worked in a youth hostel, we meet William, a curious 8-year-old boy who is counting the days while waiting for his father to return.

“These are all places where I have stayed for quite a long time; in Scotland, I cleaned the hostel in the morning and in the afternoon I went for a walk, I wrote. »

With Lou, in Iceland – where she did an artistic residency in 2018 – we discover “the sea that takes hold, that is angry”, says the author. “It’s a bit the story that is the saddest. He is in denial about the death of his brother whom he is looking for in the last places where he was. »

Then there is Brittany, with Célia, a teenager who would like to find ardor through the “ambient drowsiness” of school.

coast to coast

Although their stories are far from alike, all these characters are united by the same loneliness and a desire to escape which drives them to seek answers facing the ocean. From the bottom of the sea, a silent observer scrutinizes them: the lumpfish, this particular fish that she discovered in a marine biology laboratory, in Iceland, and which lives on both shores of the North Atlantic. “When I started to do my research on it, I said to myself: this is my character. A bit like a common character between all these places,” says Romane Bladou.

Moreover, these romantic wanderings to the four corners of the North Atlantic are in a way a reflection of the life of the young woman, who arrived in Montreal from France at the age of 14. She spent eight years in Quebec before heading west to do her master’s degree in photography in Vancouver, where she has lived for the past five years. This summer will mark her “great return” to France, a trip she had been thinking about for some time; but she does not rule out returning to Quebec one day. From one shore to the other, his only certainty is that his life will continue to be written around images and words.

Romane Bladou will be at a signing session this Saturday, from 2 p.m., at the Salon international du livre de Québec.

North Atlantic

Romane Bladou

The People

264 pages