“Les Enfants du broad”, by Virginia Tangvald, JC Lattès, 212 p., €20, digital €15.
Hold on to the railing! Virginia Tangvald’s first book is one of those that throws waves of sea in your face, that rocks you, turns you around and then leaves you stunned, without a square inch of dryness or the slightest certainty once the wind has died down. Who was this Peter Tangvald at the heart of the storm? A hero, a boat madman, a murderer? And why this curse which seems on the verge of annihilating the whole family? In this harsh, if somewhat complex, autobiographical story, the author provides the pieces she was able to bring together, and leaves the reader with the delicate task – or the delicious pleasure – of putting them together.
At the center of the questions, Peter Tangvald could pass for a rather outrageous romantic figure if he had not actually lived sixty-six years in our sublunary world, from 1924 to 1991, and has already caused a lot of ink to flow. His, first of all. Adventurer, explorer, intrepid navigator, photographer and writer in his spare time, the Norwegian has forged his own legend in two autobiographies (untranslated). The picaresque and tragic journey of “saddest wanderer of sailing” also encouraged the Quebecois Olivier Kemeid, who had encountered him as a child, to write a first novel about him, Tangvald (Gaïa, 2017).
That of Virginia Tangvald, his youngest daughter, is of a different order. It is located at the confluence of three genres, the shipwreck story, the tale and the family investigation, which together give it a striking force. Ships submerged by the waves and their rare survivors have long formed a powerful narrative source from which Boccaccio, Herman Melville, Daniel Defoe, Jules Verne and Alessandro Baricco drew. Nothing is more spectacular than this cruel confrontation which shatters man against the sea, collides dreams and reality, social bonds and individual impulses, reason and instinct.
Scary bogeyman or ogre
The Children of the Sea is part of this lineage. The story begins in 1991 on the island of Bonaire, off the coast of Venezuela. Peter Tangvald’s sailboat is in pieces. The navigator was discovered drowned. Three days later, a little girl floating in her dress is found, near a blue crab. “This is the body of my sister, Carmen”writes Virginia Tangvald. Their brother Thomas survived the accident, but he in turn disappeared in 2014, aboard his small sailboat, between Cayenne and Natal, in Brazil.
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