Vincent Delecroix 

The inspirations behind Small Boat    

The book is based on a real event that happened in November 2021, when a small boat sunk in the Channel with 29 migrants on board. Despite numerous calls for help during almost all the night, the French navy never sent any help, although it clearly received the calls and even promised to rescue the passengers. 27 died, two women and a child among them. Following this disaster, seven military agents from the operational centre for survey and rescue have been charged for failure to assist persons in danger.  

At the beginning of investigations, audio recordings of the communications between migrants and the young operator in charge at the centre were made public. Their content is terrible. The young woman in charge shows no compassion at all, makes appalling jokes, lies and finally expresses simple irritation, answering roughly and sarcastically to the desperate calls of the shipwrecked. This was the real starting point of my novel, a fiction that tries to imagine how someone with no evil in her, who is just anybody, can act and talk in such an inhuman manner and become a striking example of the so-called ‘banality of evil’, as Hannah Arendt put it. 

But the purpose was neither to formulate a moral judgement nor to just express loud and easy indignation. On the contrary, it was to suspend all moral judgement, and, by writing an imaginary character, to simply try to penetrate a consciousness that could belong to anyone.  

It’s an exploration of the mind. So, the point of view of the writing is strictly hers, except for a short central part that describes the wreckage as dispassionately as possible.  

What does it mean to be a spectator of the wreckage, as we all are? What does it mean to stand at this point, on the shore? How can anyone slip from a common and ordinary behaviour to a calm inhuman position? These were the main questions I wanted to raise, faced with a brutal and dreadful situation. 

How I wrote Small Boat  

I wanted it to be brief. I wrote very quickly, continuously, as I wanted to follow the internal flow of consciousness of the main character’s mind, with their contradictory thoughts and feelings, images and hallucinations, self-justifications, griefs, remembered fragments of her life, hope and fear, rage, confusion and subjective and partial description of the facts. I finished it in three weeks, in some kind of hallucinated state of mind. 

The writing was defined by two negative conditions. First, no prior investigation, just the public facts related in the newspapers and the transcription of the audio recordings: these were the only matters from which I authorised myself to imagine and construct a corresponding character. Second, no pathos, no tears, no shouting or mourning. 

What caused me many difficulties was the short central part of the novel: the description of the wreckage itself. I wanted the scene to be described at the water’s edge, to get across what it is to take several long hours to die in the middle of night, abandoned by everyone, to drown slowly in the cold water. 

On the other hand, I found it easy to penetrate more and more the operator’s mind. This was the most troubling experience, as I progressively realised that I could really be her – and act and speak like she did. At the end of the writing, I had the striking feeling that I had really crossed a small and desperate territory of evil. I was sure that readers would not be able to stay still – this was the purpose – and would experience a deep discomfort, maybe even a moral shock.  

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parma (The Charterhouse of Parma); passion, speed, humour, subtlety, a twirling writing and memorable characters. 

The book that made me want to become a writer  

Two books, very different: 

The first one was Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: I had never seen such a freedom in writing and invention, as the author gave the impression of being able to do anything and transgress every convention of the novel. It revealed to me a huge domain of literary possibilities. 

The second was Thomas Bernhard’s Extinction, and then all other books by Thomas Bernhard. Long, violent, shocking monologues; delirious and desperate ways of speaking and telling; a very deep and dark conception of life; social criticism and bitter irony; and, each time, a singular voice and its variations – which is for me one of the most important features of my own writing.  I have never felt more affinity with an author. 

The book that changed the way I think about the world   

Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. 

A book originally written in French that I’d recommend to English-language readers   

Montaigne’s Essays. Some consider this book the very beginning of the modern French language. It is for me an inexhaustible gathering of reflections, questions, surprises and pleasures, a unique example of untied and free writing. And a complete artwork, by its content and by its forms, even though it gives you the impression that it could continue endlessly. An extraordinary blending of philosophy and literature, full of energy, mixing humour and melancholy, high thoughts, subtle reasonings, erudition and colourful descriptions – the whole of life grasped by the most lively way of writing. 

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

The Birthday Party by Laurent Mauvignier. 

Helen Stevenson 

The inspiration and process behind my translation of Small Boat  

I read reviews of Naufrage in the French press and was curious. Once I’d read the book I rang the French publisher, established that the English language rights were available, and translated some sample pages to present to publishers in the UK. I was surprised that it had been overlooked. A number of publishers said no, when they replied at all, but Pete Ayrton [of Small Axes] said ‘yes, let’s do it’. We’re all so accustomed to reading news pieces about the migrant crossings, we have a way of reading them without really reading. Here was a fictional text that forced the reader to slow down. It raises painful questions about responsibility, about looking away. I remembered reading the news coverage, and seeing a documentary called The Crossing, in which a survivor of the sinking talked about that night – I rewatched it while I was translating. I was really struck by a phrase I read in This Tilting World by Colette Fellous – that the word translate literally means to ferry across.    

The book that made me fall in love with reading  

My favourite book as a child was When Marnie Was There by Joan G. Robinson, about loneliness and friendship. A girl goes to stay in East Anglia to recover from an illness. Alone under a huge sky, over the long weeks of summer, she is befriended by a ghost girl. I loved the way I could experience and recognise both loneliness and its remedy through the process of reading and make-believe.  

The book that made me want to become a translator 

I remember translating D.H. Lawrence in a class at university – a rare writer, in my experience at the time, from the north of England, where I came from. So the formative experience was more the other way around, discovering that a piece of poetic writing in English could be unravelled and made new in another language. It felt like a magic power I wanted to have, to be able to do that. D.H. Lawrence is still my guilty pleasure.  

The translator whose work I always look out for  

For his brilliance, I admire Mark Hutchinson, who has made such wonderful translations of the work of Anne Serre. For her positive example, Mary Hobson, who learned Russian in her sixties so that she could translate Tolstoy and Pushkin!  

The book I’m reading at the moment  

I’ve recently read Held by Anne Michaels – and will re-read it. The writing feels like a translation into words of intuitions and understandings that rarely find their way out of the mind and onto a page. To feel profound gratitude to an author, an artist of any kind, is a wonderful thing.  

A work of translated fiction that I’d recommend to English-language readers 

Brigitta by Adalbert Stifter, translated from German. I can’t even describe why I love that story so much. I’d happily translate it myself – though it would be painstaking – for the sheer joy of inhabiting its intoxicating moods, landscapes and longings in slower-than-real time. I do like the varying rhythms and tempo in the act of translating, the way it can go so slowly, then suddenly plunge ahead at a giddy pace you can barely keep up with.   

The International Booker-nominated book everyone should read  

Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann; and the short stories of Lydia Davis. 

Why is translated fiction so appealing to a new generation of English-language readers?   

Independent publishers have completely transformed the world of translated fiction. I wish it had been as vibrant a scene when I was in my twenties – back then it was all ponderous canonical classics, it seemed. People and languages are on the move now, the world is bubbling, tilting, how could young people not be curious beyond borders, as well as wary of parochialism, the canon, the big sell? Globalisation has had the paradoxical effect, in the domain of fiction, and perhaps film, too, of making people more curious than ever about the actual character of other cultures and experiences, about difference.