This story is sensitively portrayed in a light and gentle way despite the seriousness of the themes it touches on: an abusive father, a deserted mother, global warming becoming almost unbearable, and confinement in a village with backward and sinister customs. Marcelle, a perceptive and courageous teenager, nevertheless stays afloat, doing whatever she can, finding pockets of oxygen between the brambles and the metallic sky.

This could all be reality very soon. Summer never ends in La Plaine, a village in the canton of Geneva, less than a kilometre from the French border, where the Allondon flows into the Rhône. The river ‘indulges in its respiratory whims’ in this umpteenth scorching summer. After extreme floods devastated its banks, it is now ‘holding its breath’ and getting very thin. Life fades away, dies out, while power cuts, stifling heat and a lack of opportunities make pleasures a rarity. Caught between a father with wandering hands, a brother on the autistic spectrum, villagers addicted to alcohol, lottery games, various kinds of madness and simply boredom, how can you breathe normally when you are under twenty and neither the future nor elsewhere hold any promise?

Flacon won’t be able to brighten Marcelle’s days or offer any glittering prospects. At Flacon, perfumes, of course, are made but also flavour enhancers, synthetic aromas, hydrosols, anything that can ‘mask the stench that the heat brings out’. It is the only active factory of two in the village, since the other is nothing more than an ‘industrial dinosaur’, an empty carcass where we no one even knows what was manufactured. But Marcelle must work hard because her father is ruined, her mother has vanished, her brother is unmanageable, and the house and property have already been sold by bailiffs.

The setting is well chosen and described. Life in La Plaine is as flat as Marcelle’s chest, ‘which the scatterbrained girls at school with their flourishing imaginations called until recently the breadboard, the ironing board or fried eggs’. And the river reduced to a ‘fine trickle’ makes you want to sigh its name while shrugging your shoulders: ‘Allons donc’ (so let’s go)…

Dense, sensory, figurative writing, where not a single metaphor is hackneyed nor any comparison too obvious: each analogy, each figure astonishes, detonates and produces sparks by confusing the reader’s expectations. The style takes us away from the obvious to bring back corporeality, the grain of experience, of life. Within these unique, funny, offbeat images, there is humour—the humour of a narrative voice that has been through a lot but does not lack tenderness. A voice capable of looking this teenager in the eyes and saying ‘you’ and, in doing so, also holding her gaze—disillusioned, sad at times, resigned and yet resilient.

Condemned to become the responsible parent of her older brother, to suffer the alienation of an abused body, to suffocate in this semi-deserted and almost desert-like valley, the heroine nevertheless makes her way through the undergrowth. This teenager, literally burned by the world around her and by daily micro-aggressions, becomes, over the course of the novel, incandescent.

Text by Alice Bottarelli

Title

Comme de l’eau dans l’eau

Publisher

La Veilleuse

Translation rights

Florence Schluchter-Robins, editions@laveilleuse.ch

Publication date

September 2024

Pages

128

ISBN

978-2-88978-015-0

---

Author

Myriam Wahli

Myriam Wahli was born in 1989 in Switzerland, in the industrial region of the Bernese Jura. Her writing style is intrinsically linked to her lifestyle: polymorphous, non-linear, close to the senses. Her debut novel, Venir grand sans virgules (Getting big without commas), was published by Éditions de l’Aire in 2018. In the summer of 2023, Ohne Komma, the German translation of this novel, was published by Verlag die Brotsuppe. Comme de l’eau dans l’eau (Like water in water) is her second novel.

Photo: © Anja Fonseka