Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix
Small Boat is a powerful and crushing work of translation written by Vincent Delecroix and translated into English by Helen Stevenson. It is short, less than 200 pages. A quick punch, but its effects linger.
Small Boat takes us back to November 2021, to a real-life accident that we all probably heard about from the news, or at least from glancing at the headlines. A small boat filled with migrants capsized in the English Channel, and though they called for help many times, no rescuers came to save them for hours. Only two of the migrants were alive by the time rescuers arrived. The other 27 bodies were found floating back into French waters.
The Role of a Rescuer
This story is narrated by the woman who answered the migrants’ distress calls for the CROSS, the French maritime rescue center. Readers are immediately placed in her mind with a stream-of-conscious writing style that becomes increasingly uncomfortable as she is questioned by the police investigators and accused of negligence.
The woman seems to have a concerning level of detachment from the events; she refuses to admit to any wrongdoing, repeating her commitment to her job. But, as we are privy to her private thoughts, we see her vulnerability as she puzzles through whether she can really be solely to blame for this tragedy. As readers, we want to hate this woman, along with the rest of the world, but we are trapped in her point of view. We watch as she ponders through that familiar internal fight or flight response that makes us question our own identity as a “good” person, as she searched for anyone and anything to blame other than herself. We are forced to understand this response because how could she live with herself otherwise?
Who’s to Blame
The events of that night consume her thoughts. The further we go into her mind, the more we see the situation differently. While it is entirely focused on the consciousness of this woman reckoning with her decisions, her inner thoughts inevitably ripple out into what the rest of the world has to say about this event.
The moral quandary of what we would have done in her situation becomes impossible to ask. Delecriox calls out those of us who would hide behind our empathy for having an immense luxury that those who must act in these situations do not have. The question of who is to blame becomes more and more complex.
We are forced to confront how far we will go to feel content with our own humanity. How quickly we will point fingers, villainize, and dehumanize to feed our complacency. With an astonishingly pointed lens, we are able to view the full scope of how our humanity falters.
A Sea of Familiar Ghosts
Delecruix writes disturbing truths with a soothing poetic sincerity. He uses the duality of the sea, showing both its evilness and its mesmerizing allure as he describes in intimate detail the haunting, nightmarish experiences of the migrants. As much as this is a story of humankind, Delecruix explores the immense power of the sea, calling into question the idea of man vs. man and man vs. nature. Pointed metaphors can’t help but connect the woman with the fate of the migrants, as her actions and her thoughts threaten to drown her.
Small Boat is a heavy read that confronts a sickening reality of who we are. It is reflective and unsettling, calling into question our collective negligence and our collective guilt. Much like the air gone from that deflated dinghy, Small Boat will take the breath out of you and leave you to reckon with what a story like this says about us all.
About Vincent Delecroix:
Vincent Delecroix is a French philosopher and writer. A graduate of the École normale supérieure, and agrégé of philosophy, he teaches at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. Delecroix received the Prix Valery Larbaud in 2007 for his novel Ce qui est perdu (published in 2006) and the Grand prix de littérature de l’Académie française after he published Tombeau d’Achille (in 2008). Small Boat is the first of his novels to be translated into English.
