When his mother dies, the narrator returns to the place where he grew up, a small town in the north of France flooded by a rising river. During the three days he spends there, he is reminded of the figures that have disappeared: his mother, of course, whom he once loved more than anything else, and the more disturbing figure of his absent father, who, according to legend, died in a distant war.
In his youth, a photo on the bedroom wall in an aviator's uniform evoked the missing hero. But one day the family legend collapsed: the teenager discovered that his mother had lied to him about this mysterious father. He left home suddenly. He was only sixteen. Now that is mother is dead, he returns full of grief and unresolved emotions.
He talks to the few locals, trying to recreate and understand his own past. In his typical sensitive style, Philippe Claudel takes us by the hand to scrape away layer upon layer of unknown aspects in the narrator's life, with the precision and care of an archeologist, with the big difference that as he digs deeper into the past, the emotional weight starts shifting. He came for the funeral of his mother, more as a formality as the only son, yet gradually he starts to understand his past a little better.
The overall atmosphere of melancholy and sadness is possibly the novel's greatest strength. Everything in the old village is a shadow of former times, the people who stayed are old and cannot go anywhere, the sense of desolation and decay is everywhere.
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