“Standing at the stern of the boat, Mr Linh watched his country – and the country of his ancestors and his dead – move off into the distance, while the child slept in his arms. The country moved away, growing infinitely small, and for hours Mr Linh watched it disappear into the horizon, despite the wind that blew across him, jerking him like a marionette.”
Straight away, the tone is set: the sense of time that Claudel will impose in this novel is not the frenzied rush of experience glorified by our age but the slow and regular rhythms of Asia. This time does not hang heavily; far from it. It serves as antidote to the violence ravaging the country that Mr Linh has left behind but which regularly overtakes the story.
A story that is, above all, a dialogue – not just between two cultures but most of all between two men who, nearing the end of their lives, share their solitude and, in doing so, rediscover friendship. The dialogue that unfolds between them is indeed a strange one as neither of them speaks the other’s language. But Mr Bark needs to speak and Mr Linh knows how to listen…
In La Petite Fille de Monsieur Linh, Claudel offers us the gift of a simple tale. With restraint and delicacy, he unfolds the lives of two characters whom life has not treated kindly, moving the reader to that little stab of pain that only truthful emotion can evoke.
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