Somewhere on an island that is not one, a little girl who has become a woman recounts a childhood spent in the bliss and devotion of a mother, in a universe of imagination, slowness and laughter carefully protected by her. who gives without counting and who only lives for the child she gave birth to. A universe, in short, blessed with the desires and impulses of childhood.
“Your face floods me / I drink / your dreams / your truces / your hours / your games / your joy / What remains for you? »
After the sublime collection of poetry And when we reach the end we will take root (La Peuplade, 2020), Kristina Gauthier-Landry offers a first novel woven in the same light and dark tones, full of this ability to welcome and absorb the world and love in a lucid tranquility and full of the storms that forge an existence and a feather.
In The giftthe writer, born in 1985 in Natashquan, traces the links between different generations – the mother, the daughter – detailing in a minimalist, but rebellious and poignant language, the importance of roots in self-discovery and writing, the awareness of sacrifice and the need to shed it, to take off to exist and forge one’s own path.
“When I pushed the door of this room with its freshly painted walls, a new space opened up within me.
A place to take a seat.
The beginning of writing.
I will never be alone again.
I will be with me. »
By accessing poetry, the narrator gives birth to herself first, then to the one who gave her life, making her exist outside the world and the past in which she remained prisoner. “When, choked with emotion, you say that you would like to relive parts of my childhood, I hear: live again. »
With an open heart, but weighed down by a weight, like the outstretched hand on the cover of her book, Kristina Gauthier-Landry finds the right tone between the rupture at the heart of her story and a calm that could almost be described as serene. , wise, attentive to the construction of his thoughts.
The prose, sober, limpid, ethereal, wonderfully captures the sensation of memory, capturing these inexplicable, forever immortalized moments that build the foundation of an identity, a relationship, a family.
With this bittersweet story, the writer freezes on paper these obvious facts that all mothers’ daughters go through; mourning, rejections, guilt surrounding the cradle of freedom. She also reports with rare sensitivity – for someone who has not crossed the other side of the maternal fence – this indescribable love, the erasure of oneself, the breath taken away and the culture that we only know is temporary of this other, forever part of itself, even when it finally spreads its wings without a backward glance. Of great beauty.