“Inner sea”, by Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot, L’Observatoire, 238 p., € 21, digital € 15.
To love the sea is a limitless passion. Because, for humans it upsets, liquid extent is not just part of the world. It becomes its origin and its enigma, its palpitation and its presence, so close and so distant that they remain elusive, even when you are entirely immersed. Renewed and changing, real and dreamy, the sea, offered and secret, turns out to be inexhaustible.
What happily recalls, in Inner seathe novelist, essayist and journalist Christophe Ono-Dit-Biot. From Dive (Gallimard, 2013, Grand Prix of the novel of the French Academy, Renaudot Prize for High School students), a furious tenderness for the marine universe regularly lives in his books. This time, he offers, in tribute off, a collection of intimate memories and aquatic discoveries. All the charm of this museum – personal, sensitive, chiseled – lies in the continuous, and successful alliance, of the intimate and the cosmic.
The temptation of the abyss
Because the sea, “Liquid library”, Speak constantly, inside as outside. She already fascinated the little boy of the haven pedaling in the evening until the cliff to contemplate it, “Gray or green, calm or restless, crisscrossed with cargo cargoes which, in the falling night, played the fireflies on the horizon”. His grandfather is repairing boats, the crash of pirate stories, while his father accompanies him, at low tide, harvesting strange creatures in the wet sand.
There is only one step of childhood with mythologies and the Greek gods, whose legends run on and under the waves, in the company of a people of dolphins, octopus, whales, corals. By sailing on this “Inner sea”the reader will quickly discover how fiction and reality interpenetrate, respond, sometimes even exchange their places. Atlantisby Pierre Benoit (1919), The big bluefrom Luc Besson (1988), Captain Ahab of Moby Dick (1851) and Captain Nemo de Twenty thousand leagues under the seas (1870) are both headlights, beacons and creatures remaining the joint of several registers of existence.
You have 20.31% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
