Memories of Low Tide

This as good a memoir as I can recall. Written as a series of vignettes, reminiscent in style, while not in content, to Robert Walser’s celebrated A Schoolboy’s Diary and Other Stories; each short piece captures with an almost crystalline purity some nuance of scene, personality or circumstance. The rendering of a child’s play at the beach, the endlessness of parenting with no prospect of clemency, the care-giving of daughter to aging parent are set against the unchanging backdrop of the sea and the restorative, almost medicinal, virtues of swimming. This is no work of a life overcoming horrid adversity, poverty or parental abuse, rather it is a beautiful testimony to an ordinary life, one in which the daughter grows up to someone who can write as beautiful a book as this.

Swim. Swimming to escape constraints, to escape imposed lives, reduced destinies. Swimming to invent your sensuality, preserve your fantasy. This is undoubtedly what Jackie felt all her life, begun in 1919 and led according to a secret, obstinate freedom, which made her, in a very advanced age, travel for miles to go swimming on her favorite beach, in Villefranche sur mer. In the meantime, she had married, had left Lyon for Arcachon, then, becoming a young widow, had exchanged Cap Ferret for Cap Ferrat, with its warmer sea, its great summer. What has she bequeathed to her daughter Chantal? Something indomitable, or discreetly rebellious, and this intuition that swimming, this practice that leaves no trace, is the occasion of an elusive freedom, as when a young girl, in the early 1930s, Jackie had, casually, chained a few lengths in the Grand Canal of the Palace of Versailles under the bewildered eye of the gardeners.

Raised near the beaches of Arcachon, Chantal inherits from her mother a deep love of swimming in the sea. Through her young eyes, Thomas vividly evokes the sensory pleasures of the beach: the smell of seaweed on the shore, the first sharp touch of cold water. With her parents' troubled marriage in the background, the young Chantal roams the maritime landscape freely. In a series of short, delightfully varied chapters, Thomas depicts her growing sense of independence through her developing connection to her environment. Memories of Low Tide is at once a coming-of-age memoir and a multi-faceted exploration of the geography and culture of a seaside town. A beautiful, compelling and deeply moving read from first page to last, this is a memoir that is full of incisiveness, sharp observations and plenty of life lessons. It's both a thoughtfully written and thought-provoking book, which engages easily. Highly recommended.