I started a new book today called le garçon d ´ encre by Marie-Christine Chartier, an Author from Quebec. The title of the book translates into the ink boy, although I have not yet come to the part where the book title makes sense. The book is fictional and the plot is about a young women, Maxine, who finds out that her dad has passed away and now has to come back to her childhood village for the funeral, the village she so desperately fled all those years ago. She is forced to face all the awful memories she connects to her home, also thinking of her depressed mother who suicided herself when Maxine was only 17. But coming there, she hears about the strange conditions of her fathers will: In order for her to access the fortune he left behind, she has to live for two months in her childhood home with a man she has never seen before, a man was who was apparently very close to her father before he passed away. The book is written in a mix of her present life, and in flashbacks of her youth.
” I think that the problem is spending your life thinking you are incomplete. Instead of hoping to meet one person who’s going to be everything for us, I think it is more important to develop relationships with more than one person, to assemble all of that affection to steady yourself. For me, loving is not needing someone to complete me. Love is the glue that makes sure that the already complete person that I am can be happy.”
This is a quote, translated by me, from Alex, the mysterious man her father knew and she now has to live with, when she opens up to him about the feeling that she is incapable of truly loving someone, in part also because of the lack of love she received from her parents. I think it is an interesting paragraph, mostly because it shows the modern point of view the author has about love and self-identification, which she transfers to her characters. You can tell that the whole book was written recently and that the author is relatively young by the words and expressions she uses, but also in the way she makes her characters think. I also think this paragraph is beautifully honest and true, romanticising in a poetic way that you don´t need to “wait for your second half”, but rather recognise that you are already complete by yourself.