Charles Quimper's In Every WaveReviewed by Joseph Schreiber
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Every parent’s worst nightmare. Your child is playing on the shore, on a dock, or by the edge of a river. You let your guard down, just for a moment, and, in an instant, they are gone. Swept away. Lost. That all-too-horrifying and frighteningly possible prospect is the catalyst for In Every Wave, the latest release from small Quebec-based publisher QC Fiction. However, what follows is not a dramatic, ripped-from-the-headlines search and rescue tale, but rather a spare, haunting, poetic exploration that touches the depths of parental loss and grief.
On the surface, Charles Quimper’s novella is a father’s mournful elegy to a young daughter who tragically disappears on a summer holiday at the beach. But beneath the surface there are stronger currents at play. This slim volume is, by turns, achingly beautiful, strangely fantastic, and keenly disturbing. The reader, caught adrift in the flow of words, can never really find firm footing. As the narrator’s despair becomes more intense, his search for his missing child, at first metaphorical, becomes increasingly surreal. Is he simply living through the nightmare of his bereavement, or worse, completely losing grasp of reality? The answer is not obvious because In Every Wave presents with an entirely internalized landscape, at once as confined and expansive as the narrator’s imagination, coloured and defined by the breadth of his sorrow. Speaking, we are told, from the deck of a small boat, adrift on the ocean, the narrative unfolds as a fragmented, nonlinear monologue addressed directly to the absent daughter, to her precious memory. Little Beatrice becomes her father’s audience, confessor, and obsession. And although he weaves in echoes of games they played and the special moments they shared, he also speaks to her with a raw, pained honesty: |