We read “Jour de resac” by Maylis de Kerangal, Le Havre de la jeunesse

S“it's hard to see clearly in the tumultuous and disorderly flow of the literary seasonit still takes relatively few risks to predict “Jour de resac”, Maylis de Kerangal's new novel, a success that would obviously be deserved, since the book is so beautiful.

From “The Birth of a Bridge” and “Mending the Living,” award-winning, acclaimed, adaptedconciliating the general public and demanding readers in the same fervor, Maylis of Kerangal is undoubtedly one of the most prominent voices in our literary landscape. Also, her return this literary season is nothing short of an event, already positioned among the favorites for the big autumn literary awards (which, at this time of year, is the surest way to “have none”) and waited as long as possible. sometimes be in the corner of the forest…

A body on the beach

Jour de resac is both a coming-of-age book and a return to basics. It is the story of a woman in her fifties, a film and TV dubbing woman, Parisian by adoption, who spends quiet days with her longtime companion and their teenage daughter. Her existence will be turned upside down by a phone call from a police chief in Le Havre, the city of her youth where she has not returned for more than ten years, asking to see her about “a matter that concerns her”.

Once there, she learns that the body of an unidentified man has been discovered on a beach in the city with her phone number in his pockets… Disturbed, she will stay in Le Havre after the initial statement. A few hours when everything will slowly come back to him. Everything, meaning nothing or very little about the man in question, but her youth, the cinema, the bar she frequented, her lost horizons. Le Havre between waves and concrete, Niemeyer and Perret, traffic and the port area.

A metaphor

The plot of the novel is quite classic that of a thriller, but Maylis de Kerangal is too wise a novelist not to “pervert” the codes. Le Havre, which is indeed the city of this sailor's daughter's childhood and youth, is here much more than a setting or a commentary, more than a character; it's a metaphor.

An assertive art of romance that feeds on a hyper-realism that makes the reader dizzy.

This city destroyed and rebuilt, provincial and cosmopolitan, turning its back on the sea and withdrawn into itself, is her, is her heroine. Arriving at the moment of what might be a first appraisal and unconsciously searching for the distant echoes of a lost love… More than ever, Kerangal deploys an assertive art of romance, which is nourished by a hyperrealism that gives the reader as a dizzy spell. All these are dense, but never obese. And what passes silently in these pages is time. The one who passes by and what he does to us.

“Surf Day”, by Maylis de Kerangal, ed. Gallimard/Verticales, 242 p., €21, e-book €14.99.