“Day of surf”. From Maylis of Kerangal. Verticals. 242 pages. €21.
All it took was a cinema ticket marked with her telephone number to bring her back to her hometown, which she had left ages ago. This thin clue found on the body of a man abandoned on a beach in Le Havre led investigators to summon her. Who is this man? Why had he written down her number?
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Maylis de Kerangal’s novel opens with one of those MacGuffins that Hitchcok loved, sowing pretextual elements at the start of his films. Thus, in “Jour de resac”, the quest for the identity of the dead person gradually slides into the background to give way to Le Havre and the stirrings of the past that the city provokes in the narrator during this single day.
Autopsy of a city
When responding to the police summons, she did not expect such a trip. For a long time, his Parisian life has been written far from the Normandy coast. Voice actor for the cinema, married to a printer and mother of a teenage daughter, the heroine of the story is captured at a moment in her existence where she approaches unknown shores. The doubts of middle age overlap, her job weakened by the entry into play of Artificial Intelligence and the memories that ricochet as soon as she returns to the setting of her youth.
The tour de force of Maylis de Kerangal is born from the perfect adjustment of these different horizon lines. The ghosts of the city destroyed by the Allied bombings in September 1944, the mysterious dead man on the beach, the blurred silhouette of Craven, his first love, the migrants swallowed up by the English Channel and those driven out of Ukraine at war respond in echo. .
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All this makes sense, contributes to the portrait of the unique port city with its basins, its docks, its giant container ships whose size is defined according to the number of boxes transported. Le Havre, a graphic city with its “prodigious cinematography”, its industrial port aesthetic, its Perret district and its ranges of gray, “a magical gray”, draws a sensory landscape of which the novelist captures every nuance. Embroidered with this technical precision dear to the novelist of “Birth of a Bridge”, the story, however haunted it may be, remains anchored in reality, whether it concerns the hallucinatory pages on “the city on the ground” from 1944 or the rites of the baptism of a pilot’s star.
Fake noir novel, true atmospheric novel crossed by an enigma, “Jour de resac” deposits on the shores of Le Havre the precious small change of memories.
