Lilia has been leaving people behind her entire life. Haunted by her inability to remember her early childhood, and by a mysterious shadow that seems to dog her wherever she goes, Lilia moves restlessly from city to city, abandoning lovers and friends along the way. But then she meets Eli, and he's not ready to let her go, not without a fight.
These are the words I noted as I read : dreamlike, quality of light, colours, pomegranate on a blue plate, love of words, lost languages, different concepts, transient, evanescent, limbo.
I didn't like the way it ended at first, but... Well, no, I didn't expect the way it ended because there is something I didn't really understand, but other than that, I loved this novel.
The first impression I had was watching things happen through a glass, like when you're on a train or a car, looking out at lanscapes that seem to blur. Or people on the outside watching you ride in a blur. A separation between those who act and those who talk about acting.
Lilia has been on the move, on the run with her father, ever since she was 7. Now, she doesn't know how to stay somewhere. It's like the sea : coming, going, ripples caused by a stone thrown in the water affecting those who are around. Lilia and her father are always driving, changing places, impacting other people fugitively... or not. You know there is the story behind the story, an origin, it's easy to guess what in the first few pages.
Lilia loves the quality of light, the colours, taking pictures that remain with her, she loves words and languages, lists : how could I not relate to her, I love the same things. Look at this quote :
"I dream in Chamicuro," the last speaker of her language told a reporter, in her thatched-hut village in the Peruvian jungle in the final year of the twentieth century, "but I cannot tell my dreams to anyone. Some things cannot be said in Spanish. It's lonely being the last one."
He looked up from his notebook and there were tears in her eyes. If the dreams of the last speaker of Chamicuro won't survive the passage into another language, then what else has been lost ? What else that was expressible in that language cannot be said in another ? A language disappears, on average, every ten days. Last speakers die, words slip into memory, linguists struggle to preserve the remains. What every language comes down to, at the end, is one last speaker. One speaker of a language once shared by thousands or millions, marooned in a sea of Spanish or Mandarin or English. Perhaps loved by many but still profoundly alone, reluctantly fluent in the language of her grandchildren, but unable to tell anyone her dreams. How much loss can be carried in a single human frame ? Their last words hold entire civilizations."
Nuances, things, feelings that can't be translated but hold in one word in one language, not in others. Or several words to describe the different snows in another, which don't exist in ours. "Glaz" in Breton means at the same time green and blue, because in fact, it's the colour of the sea, ever changing.
This story is about movement, inertia, ripple effects. It's wonderfully written and built, the characters are fascinating, I was drawn to this novel, absorbed by it, I would almost say it was poetic. This author is a major discovery to me, one I intend to get back to.
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