"Time only glances back over its shoulder, like an animal raising its snout for a moment from the carcass it is devouring. But it is enough for space to be able to dig out its slopes again, for the world to be tipped slightly out of true."
Marie Darrieussecq's novel White (2003) written in a delicately calm poetic prose uses sci-fi dystopia to raise fundamental philosophical questions about the human condition in corporeal time and space. From a temporal perspective, it's interesting to read this novel set in the year 2015 in its own time!
What is it to carry on investing in a scientistic project of European colonisation in the year 2015?
What is it to consider the austere minimum of an indifferent nature colonisable?
In this spectrally romantic novel, ghosts inhabiting the fluid crevices of time are at the helm of the narration as they effortlessly move in and out of the protagonists' memories. In the inanimate whiteness of the poles reproduction becomes a melancholic memory trace of the human.
It's quite a different reading experience from the Darieussecq I have read before: My Phantom Husband and Pig Tales. This one's corporeal but less visceral. A beautifully sedate performance from one of the best French novelists of our time.
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