The structure of Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s When Water Became Blue is a masterclass in time travel; the first three micro-chapters of the novel are an epilogue of sorts, and the last page of the novel circles back to where it all begins. In this moment, the unnamed protagonist and her daughter, their eyes toward the sky, welcome back the Canada geese from their travels down south. Spring is here, signalling renewal. 

In between this capped narrative, her story unfolds as a writer looking for inspiration while on an artists’ retreat, away from her husband, Sasha, and daughter, Ama. On this retreat, on a small, almost deserted island in the middle Saint Lawrence River, she meets a painter (also unnamed), who will become her lover, a marine biologist named Narcisse, and Hisaé, a Japanese archeologist, who are all taken care of by the guardians of the lighthouse, Clo and Yvonne. We come to understand that the retreat is an escape, a safe one, over the course of which she allows herself to fall in love with this painter. 

This intimate exploration of how she gives in to her desire is layered with accounts of famous artists’ personal lives, including that of Barbeau-Lavalette’s own grandfather, Marcel Barbeau, among others. The themes of water and nature are all-encompassing, creating the rhythm by which she and the others live while on the island. How can she redefine her own female desire against the one defined by philosophers, writers, Greek mythology, and artists, all mostly male? 

Each page is filled with capsule-like observations of the physical world rebounding off her innermost thoughts, in a space where writing, painting, and the river merge to capture the essence of a colour, of a state of being and of inspiration. The chapters are of varying length but short, with the shortest ones being poem-like, mimicking uneven waves hitting the shore. Everything seems to tie back to the colour blue, Barbeau-Lavalette’s family history, love, death, and desire.  

The writing is intimate, in the first person, and she addresses her lover in the second person. The affair feels almost opportunistic until she gets completely caught up in it. She is supposed to write. But before she is able to, something must be provoked in order to erase the void created by her lack of inspiration. Sasha and Ama are not there; she is free and able to “let go of the mainland” and “drift toward” her lover and “make the river [their] liquid story.” 

Extrapolating what is real and what is fictional in the novel is unimportant. The way Barbeau-Lavalette beautifully weaves between both is part of the novel’s attraction. The filiation of women across generations, from grandmother to granddaughter and then again from mother to daughter, is the thread that connects the main character to her internal journey of letting desire take over and its eventual splintering when confronted with the reality of society. Rhonda Mullins’ powerful translation has captured the subtleties of the author’s voice and her economy of words, all the while recreating the underlying narrative so delicately assembled in French.mRb