Swallowed

This is a big one to swallow. There are few Quebec books I've heard so much about, and yet I never understood what it was about. It was when I noticed that all of my literature professors had mentioned Réjean Ducharme with deference at least once that I finally decided to check another item off my list of classics.

Summary

Berenice Einberg was born into a dysfunctional family. Her Jewish father and Christian mother want to tear each other's heads off at every word and affection at home is almost non-existent. They separated the two children: Berenice is Jewish like her father, her brother Christian is Christian like her mother. And rather than eternally seeking the approval of her parents, Berenice of her parents, Berenice has the intelligence to rebel. She openly confronts her parents and claims complete autonomy of thought: she will always be free, no matter what happens to her body. Any attempt to control her to control her is useless. Her life is her own. But this defense mechanism is not without consequences...

Impressions

The title gave me the impression that the book was poetic, cute, full of pretty phrases that you could glean like flowers while smiling at the brilliant wordplay. It's funny how much I was wrong.

The narrator is a child, but nothing in the book is childish. Berenice's mind teems with a strange hatred for such a little girl. Her love is rare, focused, and if it is not reciprocated in every way, she feels betrayed to the core of her heart. Her vocabulary is not that of a little girl, the words are too complex, they are words that I had never read in my life, but you can still feel the restless child who is talking behind. In this book, the oral is intimately linked to the literary.

Unlike many traditional female characters, Berenice's body is only a shell. She describes it as she would describe that of an animal. One feels it dirty. She crawls in the mud, in the sand, the elements penetrate her and reflect her emotions that could... swallow everything. Like a wave that would swallow everything.

It could be that all the elements of the setting are only projections of Berenice's mind. I imagine the place where she lives as a medieval castle, all in stone, cold and lit only by torches that cast gloomy shadows. The surrounding landscape is bare, desolate, dry or drowned, with no in-between.

Death is omnipresent. Berenice plays with death. She is insanely strong in the face of it. It's hard to say if we can speak of courage, because she is not afraid, and there is no courage without fear. In fact, she has little emotion. One senses in her a murderer in the making.

She says she is hated, but it is hard to see tangible evidence of a lack of love elsewhere than in her father, and ironically he is the family member who is mentioned the least. The target of her hatred is her mother, her beautiful, loving mother, who constantly seeks her daughter's love, who watches over her when she is sick, who apologizes for her mood swings, who seems so vulnerable. We have front row access to Berenice's mind, and yet it remains and yet it remains impenetrable.

Did I like Swallowed? Short answer: no. Even if it is of a stunning originality. The problem is that you get used to it. Soon, there is nothing endearing about Berenice Einberg, I only saw her mental illness, her scary side, her destructive madness. When she kills her mother's cat and shortly afterwards discovers that the gardener has committed suicide, all of this in total indifference, I was left with nothing but disgust. She is frightening, she dreams of murder and destruction, one would like to imprison her. The beautiful sentences turn into delirium. One detaches oneself.

I left the book certainly edified, happy as every time one finishes a great book, but also a little drained, my heart a little shaken, with a little nausea. My respect remains immense. Réjean Ducharme wrote it when he was my age. Who am I beside him?