Winner of the 2023 Robert-Cliche Prize, the novel La Rumor du Ressac is an eventful journey through mourning, a touching father-daughter dyad for which the author Line Richard drew on her memories and let herself be guided by moments both mundane and inspiring.

“It’s as if, in me, there are plenty of images that slowly reveal themselves and, eventually, there is a story that takes shape and that knocks at the door”, explains the writer from Gaspésie. , who this year won the prize that has been awarded since 1979 to the author of a first novel, all genres combined.

The result of his very organic approach is a brilliantly written book that won over the jury made up of journalist Manon Dumais, author kyiv Renaud and bookseller Shannon Desbiens. During 184 pages that we turn impulsively, we follow Léa and her father, Martin, through a long journey in Western Canada in which they are accompanied by the ashes of Suzanne, mother of the young girl who suddenly gave herself the dead.

“A novel of mourning and remembrance, La Rumour du ressac also speaks of the strength, by turns slow and tumultuous, of reinventing oneself and encountering the other. Line Richard has given her writing a rhythm that embraces their continual movement,” note the members of the jury.

The author, who lives in Baie-des-Chaleurs, has been working as a guide-interpreter in Percé since 2015. “I look at the landscapes with my naturalist’s eyes,” she tells us. I really see the details, I hear the birdsong, the sound of the sea. I pay close attention to the details, that’s for sure. This sensitivity to the moods of the earth is reflected in his writing by poetic descriptions and pictorial correspondences between the movements of nature and the emotions of the characters.

And precisely, the first part of the novel revolves around a journey from one end of Canada to the other, which Line Richard has often done in her life. “The vastness of the prairies, Western Canada and its mountains: these territories are anchored in me,” she expresses. This crossing fits perfectly with the evolution of the characters, which this trip will change enormously.

Even if the story is that of the father-daughter tandem, it is the character of Suzanne who came to the mind of the main interested party in the first place. “The first spark for this novel was in the fall of 2016,” she recalls. I had been to Montreal and in a crowded coffee shop, a young girl was performing Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne on a small stage. That moment inspired me this character of an artist who ends up getting lost a little in his chimeras… ”There followed a work of delicate literary embroidery around this primer.

Despite the healing virtues of their odyssey, the wave hits again, a few years later, through circuitous routes. “Mourning eventually catches up with Léa and Martin, it’s a bit like that, the undertow of the title,” explains Line Richard.

In this second part, their respective sorrows take different, more individual forms. They settled in Saint-André-sur-Mer – “an amalgam of villages in Gaspésie and Bas-Saint-Laurent that I have crossed in my life” -, where Martin bought himself a convenience store on the spot. of the lead, after their trip to the West.

“Léa wants to gain her autonomy, and it will allow them both to do a bit on their own. We often have portraits of absent fathers in literature, but here, it is the opposite, points out Line Richard. It’s as if Martin had tried to compensate for the absence of the mother by being too present with his daughter. »

How will they come to complete their inner journey by existing differently? We won’t reveal more. Let’s just say they will discover that the world is bigger than the anchor that their central convenience store represented…