They were welcoming, but even so: I was culturally shocked. My classes were in French, my home life was in French, I was navigating new friendships. Everything was different, and in those first few months, I felt lonely and overwhelmed. To quiet my mind, I turned to exercise. I started with running—through the cobbled streets of Rennes and the elegant parks, lined with historic buildings.
One day, I was running through the central plaza and needed to stop and stretch. I paused before a particularly ornate building that had caught my eye a few times before, yet inspired only idle curiosity—I’d assumed it was one of the city’s many opaque government edifices. That day, breathing heavily from my run, I looked more closely and realized that the structure was actually something much more accessible: a public swimming pool. It was like unexpectedly seeing an old friend in an unfamiliar place; I had to embrace it. The moment I stepped through the lobby, the comforting smell of chlorine enveloped me. Homesickness, vanquished.
Wolhuter is clever, predicting where readers’ minds will travel and cutting them off at the pass. Don’t look over there, she seems to say: focus. Some readers will find it challenging to pay such close attention in 2024 – but it’s thrilling, too, to be masterfully manipulated. The book is one thing and then it’s another, pushing the boundaries of narrative reliability, of plot, even of genre – but it’s managed so deftly there’s never a doubt that Wolhuter will pull it off in the end.
Ultimately, Daughter of the Merciful Deep is a novel about hope: a dream of a better world, a place where everyone can belong and be respected. While that dream may often seem out of reach—and there may be less magic in the real world to make it feel like a possibility—the idea that the future could hold something better than what has come before is a beautiful one.
Is writing in the writing itself, or in the sharing, and discussion, of that writing? Different versions of this question arise while reading this collection of 30 texts, written (whatever that means) between 2006 and 2023. It includes introductions to other people’s books, reviews, commissioned essays for art catalogues and interviews with other writers.