French (Canadian) Friday
French Friday comes around before you know it, but this week there’s a French Canadian theme as there’s a book out that needs to be put on your reading map right now!
We Were the Salt of the Sea
The scene setting in this book is just something else….
We were the salt of the sea
The landscape
“Cyrille said the sea was like a patchwork quilt. Fragments of waves joined together by strands of sunlight. He said the sea would sallow the stories of the world and digest them at its leisure in its colbalt belly before before regurgitating only distorted reflections.”
The sea is in the blood of everyone here:
“When you’ve loved the sea, betrothed yourself to her for better or worse and spent your whole life with her by your side, no life after death can take her away from you”
The chapters are headed by names associated with the sea which adds another frisson to the overall effect as do the small wave illustrations dotted throughout!
Alberto (1947) which is a boat and Bearings (2007). Then there are Dredgers and Trawlers, Traps and Nets, Wind drift, The flow of the current, choosing your mooring lines, Chains Cables and Tethers, Watertight Hulls, Antifouling and Boat launches to name but a few.
The sections of the novel itself create even more waves:
1 Fishing Grounds
2 Chartered Waters
3 Wharves and Moorings
4 The Salt of the Sea
5 Tethered to the Horizon
This is the landscape of the fishermen…
“I missed seeing the Indigenous fishermen come in..”
“They were dozing here empty, gently rocking to the rhythm of the waves, snoring against the wharf.”
“Sighing they slipped back into slumber like fat lazy sinking into the great blue cushion of the water…”
The wildlife is evoked with seagulls dropping crab carcasses on the rocks to crack them open. There’s not much other life out here apart as even the boats settled on the water, “perched as if in dry dock, like a dog between its legs”
The Community
The community here is close and The Gaspe Peninsula can give some a sense of freedom and others a sense of loss
“It’s not all peace and quiet in the Gaspe, detective, In Truth, things don’t work the same way they do in the city”
It’s a place where the living don’t speak of much and the ghostly whispers of the shipwrecked haunt these waters. It’s a community where outsiders might not be trusted.
Oh the language in this book is just lovely and envelops you very easily indeed.
The translation is as exquisite as it is smooth like the sea it describes. Clever and funny at the same time. There are some local terms and nuances which must have taken some puzzling out!
