«La double nuit du lac», the story of a break-up

Literary critic Julien Burri signs The double night on the lake its fifteenth publication; the sixth for the young Lausanne-based publishing house La Veilleuse. A story on the shores of intimacy.

Author of collections of poems, short stories, a play and several novels, Julien Burri has been on the literary scene for almost thirty years, following the publication of his first collection of poetry in 1996. Winner of the Prix International Jeunes Authors in 1997 in the drama category, then the following year for poetry, the Vaudois has since developed a chiselled body of work, in which the finitude of bodies responds to the solitude of nature.

«The night became both haunting and beautiful. It was shaped like a lake.»

The double night on the lake is a short text, halfway between narrative and poetic prose. It recounts, or rather experiences, the estrangement and absence of a loved one. One summer afternoon, the narrator swims across the lake, his lover watching from the shore as he slowly disappears. But another season is already brewing on the opposite shore.

Intimate shifts and ground movements

In very few pages, Julien Burri gropingly evokes the mourning of love. He observes the heart stirring beneath the memories, like a fisherman scrutinizing the smallest circles forming on the water; the words like fish slipping through the hands, viscous, alive. Reclining in an old farmhouse, the narrator reels off his thoughts, until he loses himself in his inner surf. Here, intimate movements follow the movements of the land.

«Outside this city, I've rarely felt so free.
Solitude is deep water. It allows us to stop being seen. To perceive what irrigates the days and carries them, the present in its intensity and brevity. To remember dust.»

Alongside this narrator, we try to imagine the places, to draw the colors of the coastline, to guess the smell of the seasons, the interiors of the houses. To approach the silhouettes and pasts of the characters. To expand and inhabit time. The reader wanders through the landscape as Julien Burri wanders through his emotions, with the same immobile intranquillity. With infinite attention to detail. The author from Lausanne describes the world around him in tiny touches, and the narrative unfolds like a pointillist painting.

It's a text that requires you to withdraw from yourself, to grant yourself a parenthesis. It should not be read suspended between two moments, in the flight of everyday life, but rooted in the moment. It's a text that takes up the challenge of directing the reader without guiding him or her, tracing paths and giving the reader the freedom to wander. We are sometimes taken on board, sometimes left on the sidelines, won over by the feeling that life is passing without us and that the essential is being played out elsewhere. In the footsteps of the absent, the silt of the living takes shape.

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

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Julien Burri
The double night on the lake
Editions La Veilleuse
96 pages
December 2023

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