Literature

«Summer», in the limbo of the lake and memories

4 reading minutes

written by Quentin Perissinotto · July 01, 2022 · 0 comment

«Summer», in the limbo of lake and memories

I read this 2017 novel (published in paperback in 2019), set on the shores of a lake in Switzerland, lying by the water, the pages smelling of sunscreen. What could be more normal for a book with the sweet name of «Summer»? But the first few pages quickly dispelled this impression of summery candor... Nothing is sweet about Summer. It's all a bitter backwash.

This is the story of a trap that closed on the narrator years ago and from which he cannot escape: the memory of a missing person. His sister, as brilliant as she was glib, turned her back one day and never came back. Vanished like the morning mist. More than twenty years later, his brother lives with the deep-rooted certainty that she's out there.

«Where are the people we've lost? Perhaps they live in limbo, or inside us. They continue to move inside our bodies, they breathe the air we breathe. All the layers of their past are there, tiles laid one on top of the other, and their future is there too, rolled up on itself, pink and soft as a newborn's ear.»

The waves slap against the rocks, the sentences bang against the walls of my head, all encircling and enclosing me in a deafening silence. In the same state of semi-consciousness as the narrator, I'm floating in a flood of thoughts: who is Summer? And where is she? Caught up in the whirlpool of resurfacing memories, I grope for ways to shed the weights pulling me down. Summer's silhouette appears amidst the flashbulbs, her portrait taking shape, like a wavering shadow, like the flame of a candle that will soon be extinguished. Silent moments of life streak the sky with an electricity that threatens to shake everything. To fill an increasingly unstable atmosphere with tension. A vaporous atmosphere oscillating between lightness and morbidity...

To want to forget is to think about it all the time

Benjamin - that's his brother's name - palpates life in the hollows of his memory to ward off death; he remembers the ripple of the waves as they played in the lake, the blondness of his sister's hair in the summer sun, the forbidden games they played with his best friends, the defiant look his sister gave his parents. Benjamin remembers all this and lives through this perforated memory. How can a disappearance swallow up an entire world, leaving only an illusion in its place? To want to forget is to think about it all the time. An absence like an ink blot; first a dot, then the entire horizon bathed in a viscous liquid: that of impossible forgetting.

Benjamin keeps reaching out for his sister's presence, but between his fingers only the wind flows. Summer is a novel that oscillates between voluntary oblivion and fabricated memories. It's as disturbing as a torn photograph, bewitched by a venomous truth. A floating, indecisive grace, an alluring fog, a poison. Implacable.

Write to the author: quentin.perissinotto@leregardlibre.com