“The Vikings Notebook. 70 days in the Barents Sea”, by Anita Conti, preface by Catherine Poulain, foreword by Laurent Girault-Conti, Payot, “Petite Biblio Voyageurs”, 208 p., €9.
“When we had eaten the last dog”, by Justine Niogret, J’ai lu, 192 p., €7.40.
“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”, by Jules Verne, 10/18, 550 p., €9.60.
Every fishing vessel is a warship. Any fishing campaign, a naval battle where the combatant vessel does not confront its fellows, but crosses the iron of its hull with water, salt, air and light, enduring this incessant anguish that is an empty net, a vacant hold. No book verifies this axiom better than The Vikings Notebookby the oceanographer Anita Conti (1899-1997) – “Vikings” in the spirit and in the name of the ship she boarded, a cod fisherman from Fécamp that had gone to fill its trawls between June and September 1939, due north, towards Spitsbergen and Bear Island. A campaign that this pioneer of fisheries economics and cartography saw as the culmination of a vocation, since her discovery of the sea as a child in Brittany, then her first reports with Newfoundland fishermen in the 1920s and 1930s. Another fishing trip awaited her, from 1940, that of mines, on a dredger, then again on a French trawler.
Anita Conti’s logbook is both a precious maritime lexicon that enlightens you on what a “potte” (basket), a “gogotier” (cod liver selector), a “croche” (when the net gets caught on an underwater rock) or a “pal” (abbreviation of “palanquée”, the mass of fish unloaded with a “palan”) is, a hot testimony on this incessant drama, played out on a moving and chaotic stage, that is the boat deck, a world of finely noted gestures, words captured in the moment, bodies on the breach. It represents, above all, a magnificent moment of poetic explosion, where the bursts of raw notations, the philosophical flashes, the drawings, photos, sketches restore the wild momentum and the incessant vertigo of life on board: « Et Vikings walks with its circle. There is no past or future on the sea. The trace of the wakes fades. There is the eternal second present which is the center, (…) a circular thickness that rises towards its center and closes.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Between the old “lady of the sea” Anita Conti and her young admirer, a story of fusional love
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We can measure hours with a stopwatch, the days by drawing sticks, the months by leaving notches in the wood. You can also use sled dogs: the more time passes, the less there is left to eat – hunger threatens, space closes, the cold takes hold of you. This is how the three members of the Mawson expedition proceeded in 1912-1913, when they set off to explore the depths of the Antarctic over 500 kilometres. As technical problems accumulated, climatic conditions deteriorated, men were reduced to bodies in survival mode, to suffering flesh. There, no unveiling, no polar mystical revelation as in Poe and Verne: white is only white, man is locked in his flesh. When the last dog was eatenan organic countdown sublimely narrated, dog after dog, by this high priestess of the imagination that is the novelist Justine Niogret. Superb story.
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