The Breakwater House by Pascale Quiviger
My rating: 5/5 cats
elizabeth, this book reminds me of virginia woolf, both in structure and prose. i think. it has been a long time since i have read ms. woolf, and my fear is that since i recommended this to you, you will one day read this and tell me what a nincompoop i am. but until that day comes, i will be 96% confident that this is pretty darn woolf-y!!
it begins at the ending, where a woman buys an isolated house of edenic simplicity to sort through her grief and make sense of what is left of her life. and after that, the plot meanders through the past and the present; through the lives of various characters and how they affect and enrich each other, interspersed with bedtime stories which try to keep the melancholy realities at bay.
My house is as close to the sea as a house can get before becoming a boat. As close to the sea as a boat is when it fails as a boat—by which I mean, when it is stranded. At times I command the landscape from my house. At times I see nothing at all. In my inner life, this inside of the outside, I exist only as something intangible.
this book is a perfect example of the heights women’s fiction can reach. and not just “books by women,” but women’s fiction as such. all of the relationships of women are explored: mothers and sisters and lovers and daughters and deepening friendships and echoing solitude. the sorrowful motherhood, a life full of moments—the way women involve themselves in each other’s lives, the blurring of boundaries; the richness of these strands woven into this effortlessly looping and knotted storyline…
My God, how long a birth takes, thinks Nuccia, who prefers to remain standing, pacing up and down, crouching sometimes but refusing to sit down, leaning against the wall with all her strength, shouldering Teresa away, pressing her forehead against the wall, hitting her head against the wall, trying to bite it. Gisele groans from the bottom of her throat, eyelids shut between contractions, escaping to a place known only to her, a place of repair; every time the contractions resume, her eyes open abruptly with a look of alarm, helplessness, supplication, like the disbelieving look of a child who doesn’t understand why she is being punished. Suzanne counts the seconds, her eyes riveted on her watch; the obstetrician can’t get over it – really, what self-control; Suzanne latches on to the seconds, thinking, This can’t last forever, it just can’t, latching on to the watch hand swinging like a compass in the middle of the desert, like a buoy in the middle of a shipwreck, like a syringe in the middle of going cold turkey. Aurore sings, she sings with all her might, her volatile, rambling song, her deformed, haunted, abdominal song that frightens the midwife, who nonetheless encourages her to sing louder, to squeeze the cushions against her chest, to submerse herself in warm water. The pain of one is the pain of the other, a borderless pain making unthinkable the wars prosecuted by men against the labour of women, unthinkable the blasphemy of murder when compared with the belly that incubates, with the belly that separates.
Women give birth, and everywhere, always, their pain eludes the many designations of familiar pains but belongs to the root of all pains, the raving litany of mammals, the blood of people contributing, a birth at a time, to the slow destiny of all. The great commotion of limbs couples up to the train of generations, the train of survival running along a chasm into which it is in constant danger of plunging, and women, everywhere, always, whisper inaudible words to themselves, grasping presences, women call out to the other woman, the one who survived at all costs and come what may, they call out to the female of everywhere and always, the one they are in the process of becoming through capsizing into each other, through pushing new bodies into the world. Bite the wall, count the seconds, sing their heads off. Nestle against the vertigo of an improbable sky.
and i think that is lovely, although it may be too close to purple for our elizabeth. this scene, this montage of births, is the only scene in which all the women come together, on the page; it is their one shared experience amidst the scattered episodes of their lives.
yes, elizabeth, this is a fairly sad book about strength and sacrifice and the deep dark pain of motherhood but i swear it is not all bleakness.
also, i will buy it for you, if we can ever get it into the store—i’ve been trying for a week now.
low-risk, yeah?
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