Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger

Coming Up for Air by Sarah Leipciger
House of Anansi, March 2020

Three stories braided into an elegant novel, based on a true story.

In the prologue, we meet l'Inconnue, the unknown woman. She is a French lesbian who explains how she drowned herself in Paris in 1899. Later chapters fill in her backstory, including her arrival in Paris at 19:

        As soon as I was seated in the carriage we were underway. I stared out of the window like a baby peeking from its pram. Clermont-Ferrand was sizeable enough but this was my first city, and it was Paris. Stuck behind an endless line of omnibuses and carts and other cabs, we crawled slowly along Avenue Daumensil, towards Place de la Bastille. People were everywhere, everywhere.

The second storyline is that of Pieter, a Norwegian toymaker. He was a child in 1921:

        I used to spend the summers with my grandparents on Karmoy Island. I was salt. I was sea. I spent these languid days swimming at the beach, though the North Sea, as my grandfather would have said, was as cold as a witch's tit. I splashed and kicked and dove to the white sandy bottom where the world under the surface of the water was untold, unknowable and ever-shifting.

Anouk, born with cystic fibrosis in Ontario in 1977, is the subject of the third storyline.

        Ottawa River, Canada, 2017. It's September, Anouk's birthday. She's turning forty. Her mother Nora has come with her up north because it's a big deal for Anouk, turning forty. When she was born, doctors predicted her life expectancy to be far shorter than that. They've come north, away from the city, because Anouk would like to see the river, the place where she was born, before she's called for surgery. She's on the donor list for a new set of lungs. 

All three narratives are captivating. Swimming, breathing, and drowning are among the shared elements, but there is one special thing that links them in a more concrete way. This is a remarkable story, crafted with tenderness.

Giller chances: MEDIUM HIGH - I loved this and highly recommend it for bookclubs: lots to talk about.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.