Bajo La Superficie

Gretel, the thirty-something protagonist of this fascinating and at times disturbing novel, reunites with her mother, Sarah, who now suffers from Alzheimer's, sixteen years after she abandoned her. Gretel is a lexicographer and makes a living updating dictionary entries, so she knows well that words are not immutable: neither are the memories or the life she has built on them. Until now, Sarah has been to her daughter "like a ghost sitting at her table devouring all the food," but when, after a tireless search, she finally has the opportunity to ask the questions that have plagued her since she was a child, As an adolescent, her mother's memory is no longer a straight line, but only a confusing series of deflecting circles that are drawn and then blurred. Before the separation, mother and daughter lived together on a houseboat on the Oxford canals, an environment of wild isolation, plagued by superstitions and people who don't like to be on land for long. An elusive territory rebellious to the law and geography where they live free and sovereign, but stalked by the Bonak, a mythical creature, whether in the form of a storm that threatens their ship or a fire that destroys the forest, is the embodiment of all their fears. Their "normality" is disrupted by the appearance of Marcus, a young vagabond whom they take in on their ship and who arrives as mysteriously as he disappears. What secret is hidden in the figure of Marcus? What really happened that last winter on the river? In a sort of reworking of the myth of Oedipus in a transgender key, and with an unsuspected mastery in a writer who is only 28 years old, the youngest finalist for the Booker Prize, Daisy Johnson addresses issues such as the complexity of the relationships between mothers and daughters, gender prejudices or the construction of one's own identity on the foundations of unconventional experiences. Johnson invites us, with intense, calm writing, like a sustained note, and the enchantment typical of children's stories, to go through an intricate labyrinth of murky emotions, overwhelming atmospheres and inevitable destinies.