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Daily Maverick
10-06-2025
- Daily Maverick
Small Boat — a devastating novel about a migrant shipwreck and the cruelty of indifference
The deadly results of detached officialdom are made painfully clear in this harrowing novel. There's a particular kind of story that's rarely executed well – one without heroes, without lessons, without even the cold comfort of a villain you can confidently point at and say: there, that's the evil. Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat – a slim, bruising novel translated from its original French with quiet precision by Helen Stevenson – is that kind of story. Small Boat, which was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, centres on a real horror: the drowning of 27 people in the English Channel on 24 November 2021. They were crowded into an inflatable dinghy in the dark, reaching out over crackling radio lines, asking – in French, in English, in Kurdish – for help. They didn't get it. What is known and not imagined in Delecroix's pages is that both the French and British coastguards received their calls. And both hesitated, passing responsibility back and forth like a poisoned parcel. People died while operators discussed jurisdiction. The Cranston Inquiry, established to examine the failures of that night, is continuing, its transcripts and testimonies peeling back the layers of bureaucratic neglect. Delecroix doesn't give us the migrants' stories directly. He focuses instead on a fictional French coastguard operator, a woman who spent that night on the radio doing (or not doing) what her training, her weariness, her own justifications allowed. In the aftermath, she is questioned – not in a court, but in a room filled with mirrors. She faces a policewoman who looks like her, thinks like her, speaks with her same clipped, professional cadence. She listens back to recordings of her own voice on the rescue line, promising help that would not come, offering assurances she did not believe. She is left to reckon with the unbearable fact that someone, somewhere (was it her?) spoke the words: 'You will not be saved.' She isn't especially monstrous. She's tired. She's professional. She has a young daughter at home and an ex-partner who sneers at her work. She runs on the beach to decompress. In one of the novel's most arresting turns, she compares herself to a mass-produced tin opener: efficient, functional, affectless. Delecroix draws her with enough delicacy that we cannot quite hate her. And that, of course, is far more unsettling. Reading Small Boat, I thought – as one inevitably does – of Hannah Arendt's banality of evil. Not evil as grand spectacle or ideology, but as administration, the quiet conviction that one is simply fulfilling a role. Arendt coined the phrase watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief Nazi organisers of the Holocaust. Eichmann organised the trains but claimed never to have hated the passengers. What Arendt saw was not a monster but a functionary – and that, of course, was the point. I thought, too, about my own work as an anthropologist researching forced displacement across Ireland, Turkey and Australia. I've sat with people whose lives are shaped not by violence in its cinematic form, but by violence as policy: the hotel room without a kitchen, the letter that never arrives, the bed that's taken away with no warning. I've heard a senior Irish official describe the state's provision of housing and support for asylum seekers as 'sufficient'. Meanwhile, people, stateless and waiting, are asked to prove their vulnerability again and again until even their grief is suspect. Institutional indifference The institutionalisation of indifference: that's the real story here. The smugness of protocols. The liturgy of duty rosters and shift reports. It wasn't evil that let those people drown in the Channel – it was ordinary people in warm offices citing rules, filling forms, following scripts. We can see the birth of such indifference in policies like the UK's abandoned Rwanda plan, which casually proposed outsourcing asylum itself, as if refuge were a commodity. Delecroix's brilliance lies in showing how violence at the border is carried out not by villains, but by workers. By women with mortgages, men on night shifts, people who've learnt to sort calls for help by urgency, credibility, accent. 'Sorting,' the narrator explains, 'is perhaps the most important part of the job.' Not all distress calls are equal. And the assumption – always lurking, never spoken – is that some lives are more likely to be saved. At one point, the narrator's colleague, Julien, answers calls from migrants by quoting Pascal: 'Vous êtes embarqués.' You are already embarked. A fatalist shrug disguised as wisdom. As if to say: you should have thought of all this before you left. The shrug does the work of a policy, the quotation the work of a wall. And yet, the narrator cannot fully perform indifference. She is haunted by the sea. She remembers loving it as a child. Now, it terrifies her. She feels it watching her, pursuing her, wanting to surge past the shore and swallow the continent whole. She runs along the beach to quiet her mind – a run that is almost the same length as the journey those on the dinghy tried to make. If Small Boat has a flaw, it's that it sometimes flirts with making guilt into its own form of lyricism. But this too may be deliberate. It is easier, perhaps, to feel sorry than to feel implicated. And far easier to narrate moral confusion than to prevent its causes. What Delecroix has written is not a redemption story. It's not a psychological thriller. It is a chamber piece for one voice and many ghosts. There are no grand gestures here, just small refusals, small failures. And the small, flickering boats of each human life, drifting towards – or away from – one another in the dark. In a world ever more brutal towards those who flee war, hunger and despair, Delecroix's novel is a necessary and merciless indictment. It reminds us that the shipwreck is not theirs alone. It is ours too. DM First published by The Conversation. Fiona Murphy is an assistant professor in refugee and intercultural studies at Dublin City University in Ireland. This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
The Wire
30-05-2025
- Politics
- The Wire
Adrift in Conscience: ‘Small Boat' Navigates Guilt and Apathy, But Finds No Just Shore
Menu हिंदी తెలుగు اردو Home Politics Economy World Security Law Science Society Culture Editor's Pick Opinion Support independent journalism. Donate Now Top Stories Adrift in Conscience: 'Small Boat' Navigates Guilt and Apathy, But Finds No Just Shore Suvanshkriti Singh 14 minutes ago Vincent Delecroix's Booker-shortlisted novel probes bureaucratic cruelty and moral fatigue. Yet, its vision remains troublingly narrow, haunted more by moral posturing than ethical clarity. Illustration via Canva. Real journalism holds power accountable Since 2015, The Wire has done just that. But we can continue only with your support. Contribute now For a book that was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, French philosopher Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat seems to have flown almost completely under the literary radar. Translated by Helen Stevenson, the novel is a fictional account of the drowning of 27 migrants attempting to cross the English Channel from France into England. It is inspired from a real event, and reconstructed from the forensic data produced as part of its public investigation. Despite its politically relevant subject – or, perhaps because of it – hardly a handful of major English language media outlets, including those in India, have spared it any considerable thought. Those that have, have commended Small Boat for its moral stance; few have interrogated its ethically ambiguous politics on the racialised violence migrants experience. Vincent Delecroix's Small Boat Small Axes (2025) The novel is narrated from the point of view of the unnamed French coast guard officer who received distress calls from those attempting the ultimately failed crossing. She is being held accountable for their deaths due to her refusal to send help despite receiving 14 calls in the span of two hours. She insists her inaction was based on the simple, concrete fact of territorial jurisdiction: the dinghy with the migrants had crossed over into British waters, and all she could do was to inform her English counterparts of the situation, which she did. The first part of the novel sees the narrator being interviewed by a policewoman, strikingly like herself in appearance, demeanour, and tone of voice – later revealed to be the former's own conscience. This externalisation of internality is a deft narrative device; it allows Delecroix to paint the portrait of a weary, haunted woman through his political and philosophical arguments. Bubbles in her coffee appear to the narrator as sinking boats, and yet out loud she asks if the true cause for the dead migrants dying was not 'their inability to stay sitting quietly in a room.' And, surely, she cannot be held responsible for their choice to migrate. Or, perhaps, the cause was the under-funding of rescue services, necessitating difficult decisions about resource allocation. All the narrator did was her job in the way she was trained to do, she insists – without the professional handicap of emotions or opinions. A true and mere functionary, but one unable to rid herself of visions of African construction workers sinking in a sea that has encroached inland. Delecroix is clinical and unsparing in his condemnation of the banality of evil, the bureaucratic production of inhumanity, and its psychological toll. But, the primary aim of Small Boat is to take to task the ubiquity of apathy, and the complicity of Every(wo)man in the making of what we end up calling a tragedy. The novel uses the figure of the narrator as the insider who calls out society on its indifference, both through the novel's indictment of her own impassivity and her narratorial defence of it. Delecroix resolutely portrays the narrator as a burdened, enervated woman whose inaction, in a different context, could perhaps be forgiven. She is not so much vile as pathetic; no more a monster than anyone – which is everyone – who deems themselves a neutral, unobligated party to crises happening to other people. However, the novel's moral posture is its greatest limitation, for it gets in the way of its ability to take an ethical stance. Significant portions of the novel read like liberal fantasy, where the admission of guilt relieves one of any reparatory obligations: absolution through self-flagellation. The plot's resolution involves the narrator committing suicide. Unable to bear her guilt or to rationalise it away, she walks into the English Channel. Violence begets violence, but justice is nowhere in sight, nor is any notion of what it might look like. The moment of resolution is presaged by one of Delecroix's sharpest insights. The narrator concludes it is not her actions but her words that have condemned her: it is in the expectation that she would reassure the migrants they will be saved – and not in their actual survival or death – that society had unsuccessfully sought its redemption. But, coming as it does after repeated attempts on the part of the narrator to deflect responsibility, reaching for every explanation other than her own racial antipathy, the critique loses some of its bite. Then, there is the novel's second part: a detailed, but trite description of the hours-long drowning. Delecroix writes – or Stevenson translates – his migrants as featureless, racialised bodies. They are human only insofar as the bruising experience of closely witnessing their suffering. This is trauma porn barely disguised as liberal humanism. The novel is prey to the same tendency of which its narrator is accused – an inability to conceptualise migrants as individuals outside of their victimhood. These perversities reveal further frailties. Despite its philosophical nature, the novel often misses opportunities for original, innovative critique. Consider the narrator's claim that her 'judgment has…no fissures, but it does have boundaries, which correspond exactly to the boundaries of territorial waters.' Minimally, it offers an occasion for examining individual responsibility against structural forces. At best, it is an opportunity to reckon with the validity of the structure itself. But, having glimpsed the possibility, Delecroix forgoes it, focusing instead on rhetorical empathy. Similarly, for all its erudite musings about racial violence, the novel never really asks why it is so that the experience of migrants arouses concern only when their victimisation finds its completion in death. This, despite such a line of inquiry being amply indicated in the narrator's assertion that 'these people were sunk long before they sank.' Its flaws are not insignificant, and for many, Small Boat won't be a book that moves – it wasn't for me. It may even be one that incites pessimistic helplessness, if not cynicism. This may have something to do with its intended audience being primarily White. But, literature has the great advantage of being universal; it can always be read in the context of one's own circumstances. If the fates of those crossing the Channel seem too distant as a subcontinental reader, one can always recall the Rohingya refugees India abandoned in the Bay of Bengal. Despite its imperfections, this is still a well-written novel that warrants reflexive conversation through its own questioning, quietly suggesting that we hold both ourselves, and the political structures we legitimise, accountable for our complicity in the suffering of our others. Suvanshkriti is a journalist and researcher. She has a master's in European Studies from the University of Göttingen, Germany, where she specialised in the literature and politics of migration and citizenship. She writes about books, gender, sexuality, democracy, and global justice. Make a contribution to Independent Journalism Related News An Open Letter: 'I Have Small Eyes, Mr Prime Minister' Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp' – Translated By Deepa Bhasthi – Is 2025 International Booker Prize Winner Humour, Scepticism and the Realities of the Familial in Banu Mushtaq's 'Heart Lamp' Most Indians Can't Even Afford Entry-Level Cars. 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Scroll.in
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Scroll.in
Sunday book pick: In ‘Small Boat', no one is at fault when 27 migrants drown in international waters
'I had no more opinion on the migrants than I did on migration policy or the right to asylum, relations between North and South, problems, solutions, the woes of the world, injustice: I was not required to have an opinion on the migrants.' The troubles of the unnamed narrator in Small Boat begin when, in November 2021, after receiving distress calls from migrants sinking in the sea, she tells them that help is on the way. To her colleague, off the microphone, she says, 'You will not be saved.' Some four hours later, with help yet to arrive, she signs off the small boat as 'rescued'. Of the 29 migrants onboard, only two survive. The remaining 27, including a young girl, sink to the bottom of the sea, making this 'accident' the worst of its kind since the Channel opened in 2018 for the passage of migrants from France to England. Unlike the rest of us, for whom France is an idyll, a romantic getaway, the migrants, 'under no circumstances, barring catastrophe', would like to be returned to France. In fact, things have been so bad for them there that they are willing to risk it all to be shipped off to England, also famously racist and coloniser par excellence. These migrants who have turned up from Iraq, Sudan, Syria, and everywhere else are fleeing war and poverty. In the end, like the final act of a cruel joke, the water currents drag their bodies back to the French waters. If only they had the decency to remain in the English jurisdiction, then the narrator wouldn't have been answerable for this mess. Drowned without noticing A first respondent at the Coast Guard's office in France, she's been rounded up by the police for negligence. It's not the police's moral duty, but because the call is on record, they are compelled to take action. The recordings are played on loop and scrutinised for an unpardonable slip-up, a monstrous mistake on her part. But, she did as she was taught – she took their calls, recorded their geolocation, and assured them of help without true sincerity. She acted perfectly in accordance with her role and, barring the quip with her colleagues, did not overstep her boundaries in her interactions with the sinking migrants. However, as the 'last link' in the chain, it is easiest to pin the blame on her. Still, she's not without heart. She watches thousands of migrants cross the Channel every day – to what future, she doesn't know. The man who was on the phone with her on the fateful day wanted nothing more than to arrive safely and perhaps work at a supermarket in England. Of course, she did not know that. These migrants 'were sunk long before they sank, they were washed up well before they drowned.' The second part of the novel – short and harrowing – is told from the perspective of those onboard. It feels strange to call them 'passengers' as though they were taking a recreational ride on a lovely sea. The cold sea lashes against these ill-protected migrants – what good are lifejackets and tubes in such choppy waters anyway – and the 'icy hands' of companions start to float apart. Delecroix's sober lines on these final moments sent a shiver down my spine: 'In spite of the life jacket, each person's head tipped over to one side, water silently entering their mouths, their noses, as they drowned, without even noticing.' The narrator reminds the police that she neither wishes good nor ill on these migrants, she repeats that she has no opinion on their status. She has enough worries of her own and the state of the world doesn't bother her any more as it does anyone else in her country. However, on her part, she would like to make it clear that she doesn't want these migrants to 'leave' either. She might be accused of 'moral insensivity, lack of empathy, and dehumanisation', but her neutral stand towards these refugees, in some ways, makes her appear more empathetic than those who have outright washed their hands off all responsibility. Who's to blame? In the final segment, we learn that the narrator has been suspended from her job. She lives by the sea and looks out at it in disbelief and wonder. It is by chance that the luckiest of us find ourselves on land – all of Earth is water and the land pushes back the sea every minute of every day to prevent being swallowed whole. She had come to love the sea but now she realises the sea is not something to love, but to be revered and be scared of. Her philosophical musings are punctuated by her anguish – she, too, feels wronged. Not just for being caught but because she is also at sea herself, and has been for a long time. Her husband has left and she's raising their daughter all alone. In a moment of anger, she lashes out at everyone else in the world who is enjoying the 'drama at sea' from the comfort of their homes. The judgment and condemnation are quick to arrive, but no one jumps into the water to help when the small boats are tossed into the sea. A few days ago, I watched French filmmaker Alain Resnais's 1956 documentary Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) about the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps. When the war was over and the Nazis were being tried for their crimes, the Kapo, the SS, the officers all said, 'I'm not responsible.' And yet, millions were being murdered while the wives of the Nazi men kept clean homes and their children went to school. The narrator of the films asks, 'Who among us keeps watch from this strange watchtower to warn of the arrival of new executioners. Are their faces really so different from ours?' In a similar vein, Delecroix's narrator says, 'What she called absentmindedness seemed to me so remarkable, so common, and so universal – indeed the basis of everyday life – that one could only conclude that all of us are monsters, that is to say, none of us is.' As the boat carrying the migrants was sinking in the sea, each one of us was exactly where we were supposed to be – the narrator in her cubicle watching the disaster happen, the politicians sharpening their anti-immigrant rhetoric, and the rest of us watching it on our screens and crossing our hearts. Was I responsible? No. Were you? No. Then who was?
Hindustan Times
17-05-2025
- Hindustan Times
Review: The Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix
It's not a winning title. And as titles go, Small Boat is a small book too. Just 160 pages. Three sections. Vincent Delecroix's International Booker Prize shortlisted novel is a work of fiction from start to finish. But it stems from a real-life incident on the chilly night of November 2021, when an inflatable boat, en route from France to the United Kingdom, capsized in the Channel, whilst still in French territorial waters near Calais and Dunkirk. Here's where Vincent Delecroix's story begins. Small Boat is a fictional account of the event, narrated by the woman coastguard who took the calls on the French side. Accused of failing in her duty and facing an inquiry, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Her part internal monologue, part uncomfortable conversation makes up the thorny first section. This isn't a neat little Netflix re-enactment about What Happened That Night. Phone records show that among the woman's many exchanges with the freezing migrants, are the statements: 'I didn't ask you to leave,' and 'You will not be saved'. In addition, the investigating police officer also happens to look like the woman, perhaps 10 years older. It's a genius device – the investigator serves as both the mirror and the conscience, while the coastguard may well be a synecdoche for France. The woman insists that she's neutral, that she's trained to view the life of a migrant as no more or less valuable than that of a stranded heir after a party on a yacht. She rationalises that being efficient is more useful than being empathetic in rescue operations. But it is callous insensitivity hiding behind indifference. The notion that humans, making treacherous crossings to safer shores are 'so caught up with not wanting to die', irritates her. Her 'I didn't ask you to leave,' is not what sank the boat. But Delecroix's narrator has no remorse – she's haunted not by corpses, but her own recording playing over the evening news. It's the inspector who often struggles to find the right words to say. The French-to-English translation is elegant. At one point the woman admits, 'I failed to make the distinction when I should have. And when I shouldn't have, I made the distinction'. But the testimony is at best, a thought experiment, philosophizing an ethical dilemma that shouldn't be a dilemma at all. There's a brief Section II, a sharp, quiet description of the drowning, for anyone who needs reminding of what migrants risk for a chance at a hard life in a safer country. Small Boat closes with a look at other players in the story – the coast guard's far-right ex, Eric, their young daughter Léa, and Julien, the cynical but complacent colleague who was on duty that night too. It's a reminder of the banality of evil. Like soldiers at Auschwitz who claimed to be just doing their jobs. Like the Delhi Police who let a corpse lie on a road for 14 hours in 2010 while they argued about jurisdiction. Like the officials at UP's Government Railway Police and Bareilly Police Station after a man had been run over by a train in 2015 – they squabbled for so long over who should collect the body that by the time they picked it up, another 16 trains had run over the corpse. Delecroix's book is not about the culpability of one woman; it is that we are all culpable. The author is a philosopher. Expect some spiralling passages about the difference between presuming innocence and proving it. But look past them too. Saving lives is not that complicated.
The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Mind-expanding books': International Booker prize shortlist announced
Hiromi Kawakami and Solvej Balle have made this year's International Booker prize shortlist, which for the first time is comprised entirely of books published by independent presses. British translator Sophie Hughes has been shortlisted for her translation of Perfection, originally written in Italian by Vincenzo Latronico. This marks the fifth time Hughes has been shortlisted for the prize, making her the award's record holder for the most times shortlisted and longlisted. On the Calculation of Volume I by Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber) Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson (Small Axes) Under the Eye of the Big Bird by Hiromi Kawakami, translated by Asa Yoneda (Granta) Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo) Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi (And Other Stories) A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated by Mark Hutchinson (Lolli) Six author-translator teams are now in contention for the £50,000 prize, the winner of which will be announced on 20 May, with the prize money divided equally between author and translator. Japanese writer Kawakami, best known for her novel Strange Weather in Tokyo, has been shortlisted for her novel-in-stories Under the Eye of the Big Bird, translated by Asa Yoneda. Danish writer Balle and Scottish translator Barbara J Haveland have been chosen for On the Calculation of Volume I, the first of a planned septology in which the protagonist Tara is stuck in a time loop. 'These mind-expanding books ask what might be in store for us, or how we might mourn, worship or survive', said author and judging chair Max Porter. 'They offer knotty, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes radically hopeful answers to these questions. Taken together they build a miraculous lens through which to view human experience, both the truly disturbing and the achingly beautiful.' The shortlisted titles are slim, with four coming in at under 200 pages, including Latronico's Perfection. The novel, about a millennial expat couple living in Berlin, 'transcends its satire of 2010s hipsterdom through the depth of Latronico's sociological observations', writes Thomas McMullan in the Guardian. 'This chronicle of contemporary Berlin is strongest in its articulation of how a certain kind of globalisation dislocates us from our surroundings.' Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson, was also selected. The book was written in three weeks, and is based on recordings from a real event in November 2021, when a dinghy carrying migrants from France to the UK capsized in the Channel, causing the death of 27 people on board. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion A book translated from Kannada – a language spoken by tens of millions of people, primarily in the state of Karnataka in southwest India – features on the shortlist for the first time in the prize's history this year: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi. It contains 12 stories originally published between 1990 and 2023, which capture the daily lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Completing the shortlist is A Leopard-Skin Hat by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson. Serre wrote the book, about a woman with severe psychological disorders, in six months after the suicide of her sister. 'I wanted to create a memorial to her', said Serre. The other titles longlisted for this year's prize were The Book of Disappearance by Ibtisam Azem, translated by Sinan Antoon; There's a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem, translated by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert; Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu, translated by Sean Cotter; Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia de la Cerda, translated by Julia Sanches and Heather Cleary; Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, translated by Polly Barton; Eurotrash by Christian Kracht, translated by Daniel Bowles; and On a Woman's Madness by Astrid Roemer, translated by Lucy Scott. Alongside Porter on this year's judging panel are the poet Caleb Femi, writer and Guardian critic Sana Goyal, author and translator Anton Hur, and musician Beth Orton. Authors who have previously won the award include Han Kang, Olga Tokarczuk and Lucas Rijneveld. Last year, Jenny Erpenbeck and translator Michael Hofmann won the prize for Kairos. To explore all of the books on the shortlist for the International Booker prize 2025 visit Delivery charges may apply.
