Anne Donguy

The article was written at 37°C. It brings together sixteen recent French-language novels to create a polyphonic topography of water—from the Parisian public swimming pool to private pools and North American housing complexes, to lakes and the coasts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean. In concise scenes—the hesitation on the five-meter diving board, an old man's first immersion in the water after decades, sitting motionless at the edge of an unused pool, or surfacing exhausted after a long swim in the sea—water is experienced as an elemental bodily experience: cooling, supporting, resistant. The texts show how, in the moment of bathing, social orders shift and simultaneously become visible: bodies become legible, class differences, desires, and exclusions are laid bare, while the water momentarily creates an equality that immediately disintegrates on land. At the same time, water acts as both a repository and a trigger for memory: the smell of chlorine, salt on the skin, or the recurring blue of a pool evoke childhood, first love, or experiences of loss. The novels repeatedly return to adolescence, to the initiatory moments of a summer in which a plunge into the water determines belonging, or not jumping marks a lifeline. Other texts depict water as a site of existential boundary experiences—a space for coping with grief, illness, depression, or confronting death, where language fails and only the body can respond. Between the public swimming pool, which functions as a social microcosm, and the open sea, which embodies indifference and overwhelming power, a poetics of water unfolds that neither reduces the element to metaphor nor leaves it purely naturalistic: it is simultaneously concrete matter and a resonating chamber in which life is concentrated. Summer appears as an accelerated, heated form of time in which transitions take place in contact with the water – between childhood and adulthood, closeness and loss, control and loss of control – and in which the characters are simultaneously exposed and withdrawn from themselves for a moment.