In Every Wave by Charles Quimper

 

In Every Wave

by Charles Quimper 

(translated from the French by Guil Lefebvre)

I cling to your name like a man desperate and dispossessed, probing the sound as it emerges from my mouth into silent starless nights. I ponder it from every angle, whisper it, recite it like a poem or prayer. I hiss it like a threat. However intoned or inflected, your name remains unchanged, always ending on the same note that lingers in the dark, like the inkling of a ghost… 

I left you behind, my love, but I’m the one drowning every day…

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QC Fiction is an imprint of Baraka Books, a small indie publisher in Montreal. It specialises in fiction from French-speaking Canada, translated into English.  Since the summer of 2016, QC Fiction has published three novels in translation every year, most of which were finalists or longlisted for literary prizes including the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Awards.

My introduction to QC Fiction came through In Every Wave, a 70-page novella by Charles Quimper, superbly translated by Guil Lefebvre.   The young daughter of the novella’s narrator drowns while swimming one summer.  Her distraught father becomes obsessed with water and the sea, believing that the girl he lost somehow lives on in them.  As his marriage unravels, he sets off on a journey across the oceans, determined to seek the elusive ghost of his loved child.

Or, at least, that’s the impression given in the initial pages of the novella.  Reading on, we realise that we are in the company of an unreliable narrator, whose mind is collapsing under the weight of grief.  And it is grief tinged with guilt – tellingly, every time he tries to recall the events of the tragic day, the story he tells is different, his role amplified with each retelling. 

So is the sea voyage described in the novella literal, or should we read it metaphorically? Tantalisingly, In Every Wave lets us reach our own conclusions. Whatever the interpretation we give it however, this novella is an intense, poetic – and often unbearably poignant – experience. 

Paperback, 70 pages

Published October 1st 2018 by QC Fiction