Memories of Low Tide

by Chantal Thomas, Natasha Lehrer (Translator)

Overview

A gorgeous memoir of childhood, the mother-daughter bond and the transformative power of swimming, by multi-award-winning French author Chantal Thomas Can a daughter ever really understand her mother? Chantal Thomas grew up in a seaside town on the Atlantic coast of France, inheriting from her mother an obsession with the sea, and for swimming. In this tender and eloquent memoir she seeks to understand her quixotic, often inscrutable mother - a woman who was luminous in the water and once dived into the moat of the Palace of Versailles, but became fettered by marriage and domestic life. Thomas combs the beaches of her childhood for memories, recalling the sensory pleasures of the sands, the first sharp touch of cold water, and discovering the multitude of ways in which she is still her mother's daughter. Chantal Thomas was born in Lyon in 1945, and she was raised in Arcachon, Bordeaux and Paris. She has taught History at a number of French and American universities and is the author of over 20 books. She won the Prix Femina for her novel Farewell, My Queen (2002), and later received the prestigious Roger-Caillois and Prince Pierre de Monaco prizes for her entire oeuvre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781782275213
Publisher:	Steerforth Press
Publication date:	12/08/2020
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	316 KB

About the Author

Chantal Thomas was born in Lyon in 1945, and she was raised in Arcachon, Bordeaux and Paris. She has taught History at a number of French and American universities and is the author of over 20 books. She won the Prix Femina for her novel Farewell, My Queen (2002), and later received the prestigious Roger-Caillois and Prince Pierre de Monaco prizes for her entire oeuvre.

Read an Excerpt

B e g i n n i n g
This morning I woke up to dark clouds in the sky,
after two months without rain. I didn’t need to go
outside to find out. I could see from my bed the palm
trees swaying in the wind in the eerie, leaden light,
their brilliant green fronds shrouded in grey. I’d slept
a long time, without the usual interruptions occasioned
by the light as it grew brighter, the daily miracle of a
new day heralded by the gulls’ shrieks and the doves’
low cooing. Here in Nice, during the summer months,
I wake up in several stages. This is not because I’m
anxious; on the contrary, it’s because I’m impatient
for the light, the nuances of the light, that my sleep
is unsettled. Long before the sun is fully up the light
is greenish white, becoming slowly tinged with pink,
before it finally blooms – and this is what wakes me
properly – into the pure gleam of clear gold.
The summer is blazing hot. Everything burns to the
touch. It’s exhilarating and exhausting all at once. As
if we were on the brink of some extraordinary event:
catastrophe or revelation. There’s urgency in the air: to
explode, go wild, add the fever of alcohol to that of the
world, turn up the music full blast, sit alone on a rock,
laughing, legs in the water, watching the sun set. And
when the foehn, the hot wind from the mountains to
the south, begins to rise in repeated gusts, it feels like
the Event is imminent. Waves surge, temperatures soar,
and along the pavement little piles of pine needles and
dried leaves blown from inland are trampled underfoot.
Today’s not like that at all. The sky is overcast, wind
laced with rain. I gulp down my coffee and grab a towel,
flip-flops for walking on the pebbles and a canvas sun
hat, in the unlikely event that the sun should return,
shove it all into my multi-coloured Brazilian beach bag
and hurry down towards the sea. It’s dark and furious,
nothing like the Mediterranean that I swam in the previous
evening. A calm sea, shimmering with coppery
glints, like moiré silk. An enveloping sea, whose balmy
embrace made me feel like I was swimming in a dream.
Why would I ever stop, I asked myself, as in the dusk a
buoy blinked its green light and the street lamps along
the coast came on. When I got home I flicked randomly
through a book by Roland Barthes and came across a
paragraph on Sade: “The ultimate erotic state (analogous
to the sublime legato of the phrase, which in music
is called phrasing) is to swim: in corporeal substances,
delights, the deep feelings of lasciviousness.”
Because of the sudden bad weather, I am instinctively
careful not to swim against the waves but to plunge
down with them and let them bring me back up, closing
my eyes against the foaming crests as they smack me in
the face. It’s beginning to pour, huge drops scoring the
water. It’s pure joy to be swimming in both sea and rain
at once, the rain falling in sheets, drenching my head.
But it’s such a deluge in the lashing waves that I can no
longer see, and I get out, a little dazed. My clothes and
towel are soaked. My bag is full of water. There’s no
point trying to find shelter so I go up to the boardwalk,
where enormous masses of water are crashing with
astonishing force. On the ground they create rushing
rivers, out at sea immense, light-coloured, faintly ruffled
areas of water. As the storm becomes more intense
these zones grow bigger, as if the rain bouncing on the
sea was sufficiently forceful and abundant to replace
the surface of the sea with a surface of fresh water,
fleetingly obliterating it. I’m struck by how the power
of the sea’s erasure and perpetual renewal is exceeded
by that of the rain. The sea, streaked with rain, swept
clear of the slanting lines of waves, extends all the way
to the Restaurant La Réserve, reaching another buoy
and stretching out towards the horizon.
My mother used sometimes to come here to swim,
although her regular beach was near where she lived
at the end of the Promenade des Anglais, in front of
the Hotel Westminster. But she also swam opposite the
Cours Saleya. She didn’t really have a regular beach, in
fact. Even towards the end of her life, at an age when
the normal tendency is to reduce physical effort, she
would often take the train to Villefranche-sur-Mer,
where she liked to swim in the bay – she preferred its
size and claimed it was more sheltered than the Bay of
Angels. She would swim anywhere, at all times of the
day, with a stubbornness and tenacity that she didn’t
display towards any other activity.

Editorial Reviews

• "Wonderful . . . her descriptions are a kind of bottled perfection, of long days spent in the sea and sand"—Financial Times
   • 'In spare, elegant prose Thomas explores the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive.' — Joanna Pocock, Times Literary Supplement
   • "A story of inheritance, of the fluidity of a mother-daughter relationship dissolved in a calm sea, a kind of reverse amniotic fluid, in which to dive and luxuriate deliciously"—Marie Claire
   • "This is an infinitely gentle, oblique look at a whole century, passed through as a swimmer crosses the water, from one buoy to another... Haunting and elegiac"—Livres Hebdo
   • "Sublime... Delightful"—L'Express

From the Publisher