Surf day, by Maylis de Kerangal | The Maylis de Kerangal method

Ten years after the magnificent Repair the livingMaylis de Kerangal seems to have found the key to success. Surf day brings us the French author back to the top of her art, both in substance and in form – we will also know on October 22 if the novel is one of the four finalists for the Goncourt Prize.

A woman, the narrator, receives a call from the police in Le Havre, a port city in the north of France. She is summoned to the police station: a body has been discovered on the beach, with a paper in her pocket on which her telephone number is written.

A story that begins like a thriller, with the atmosphere of a noir novel, yet Surf day is neither one nor the other. It is rather the journey of a fifty-year-old who returns to the places of her youth, where she has not set foot for decades. Throughout his wanderings and encounters, the “investigation” becomes both interior and exterior, between the past and the present, the social and the personal.

The author thus addresses a host of related subjects in this dense and dense novel, with tight writing and long sentences which sometimes extend over two pages, without ever losing the thread or the main issue. We follow the character’s thoughts, we are fascinated by the always precise vocabulary, we learn lots of things. The whole thing is sometimes a little nagging, but above all remains coherent, brilliant and heady, until the last sentence.