Anita Shreve, The Weight of Water
A winter night in 1873, two Norwegian immigrants, Anethe and Karen Christensen, were murdered on the Isles of Shoals, a group of island off the New Hampshire coast. A third woman, Maren Hontvedt, survived and spent the night hidden in a cave. What happened that night? This is what Jean, a photographer on a magazine assignment, will find out, quite unexpectedly, when she discovers, in the Portsmouth local archives, a letter written by Maren Christensen Hondvedt, years after the murders. At the same time, Jean is about to be part of a tragedy that will change her life forever…
Exploring the islands on a sailing boat with her husband Thomas, their five-year-old daughter Billie, Thomas’s brother Rich, and his girlfriend Adaline, Jean soon begins to suspect an affair between her husband and Adaline. Her good looks, her knowledge of Thomas’s works (Thomas is a poet), give Jean an uneasy feeling that will quickly turn into jealousy and suspicion. In the claustrophobic atmosphere of the boat, five people are sailing towards the inevitable outcome…
The narration of The Weight of Water alternates between glimpses of the past (Maren’s letter, the prosecution transcripts) and the present, both stories in which passions and resentment will drive people to their dreadful fates, ineluctably. The fact that the shifts between Jean’s story and Maren’s story occur from one line to the next and are not reflected by a change of chapter or, at least, of paragraph, is pretty tedious.
Anita Shreve has a good style but I find the themes she chooses to develop very depressing (I also read The Pilot’s Wife a couple of years ago), which prevented me from truly enjoying the novel. I don’t generally mind whodunits being depressing, but since The Weight of Water is not much of a whodunit, the reader is completely drowned in the gloomy atmosphere: the novel is gripping, but very grim… However, I might give a try to The Last Time They Met, which takes up Thomas’s character some years later, since I was intrigued by other reviews about this book…
Rating: 3/5
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