Autumn 2025: Small boat by Vincent Delecroix

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Normally, it should go like this: a small boat, a dinghy in the middle of the ocean, a call for help, and rescue.   

Normally, perhaps, it shouldn’t have to go like this at all, or no one should have to go, no one.  

Normally, more often than not, it goes like this: a small boat, a dinghy in the middle of the ocean, a call for help, a call for help, and then water, a lot of water, and movement through but this time lifeless, and bodies washing onto the shore, and some guilt but not too much, not ever too much since, “It wasn’t us who told you to leave”, and “It for sure was not myself”.   

***   

Drawing from a single accidental recording of a distress call operator on the line with a drowning refugee boat stuck in-between the British and French waters, Vincent Delecroix composes a critical fabulation concerned with contemporary passivity, moral doubt and complicity in everyday horrors underlying the Western delegalization of movement, especially that undertaken via water. His Small Boat, although brief and concise, confidently outlines the necessity of empathy and imagination in reawakening our sense of agency amidst the world, our commitment towards each other.   

Small Boat is Delecroix’s eighth work of fiction completed over the span of three weeks. Both a literary and an academic writer, Delecroix has been teaching and writing on Søren Kierkegaard since the completion of his PhD, and currently lecturing at École normale supérieure on the philosophy of religion. His writing centralizes loss and grief as underpinning our social fabric and investigates practices of collective mourning, especially forthose unrelated to us, whose experiences we do not directly share. Small Boat draws heavily from the thought exchanged between Delecroix and Philippe Forest in Le Deuil: entre le chagrin et le néant, in which the two argue for mourning as a practice of collective remembrance and a responsibility, embedding us within the world without misplacement. Mourning the other becomes an act of extending oneself towards the impossibility of truly knowing their experience, and so in both his academic and literary writing, Delecroix insists on the validity of bearing witness from within, “in other words, feeling the suffering of another from one’s own place”. Although the majority of his literary writing remains largely fictional, or auto-fictional, in Small Boat, the author takes on writing which mediates effectively the lived with the imagined.   

The book, originally written in the author’s native French in 2023, and masterfully translated to English by Helen Stevenson in March 2025. In its French life, Small Boat, published by Gallimard, has been been longlisted for the prestigious French Prix Goncourt, and its translated counterpart, published by Small Axes was awarded the English PEN for Stevenson’s translator work and shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025.

In Small Boat, Delecroix returns to the night of 23rd of November 2021, when a group of at least 32 people set out to cross the Channel on a small inflatable dinghy from the area around Dunkirk in France towards the British border (“the death route”). As the boat begins to take in water somewhere in-between the French and British territory, those on board issue an emergency call to the French naval division calling for urgent help. Because of their supposed liminal location, the French officers delegate the rescue mission to their British counterparts in Dover, later on disingenuously assuring that help was on its way. At 1.30 in the morning a call rings again this time informing the French that the group has now found itself in the water. “Yes, but you are in English Waters” is the registered response of the call operator who finally decides against issuing a rescue mission.  27 people drowned around 4 in the morning that night.   

Although the deaths of people on the move have long been integrated into border security policies as predictable casualties turned into an everyday occurrence, the event of 23rd of November 2021 reverberated in the French, British and international media for weeks to come. What made this night particularly striking was in part the harrowing number of people found dead at sea, the failure to provide support despite the legal obligation to do so, and partly the recorded details of a private conversation exchanged between the French coastguards — the following few sentences in particular: ‘Don’t you get it? You won’t be saved. “I’m up to my feet in water?” It wasn’t me who told you to leave.’   

 Delecroix takes the coastguard’s utterance as a point of departure for his story. Divided into three segments Small Boat accompanies the French officer through a criminal investigation during which the text’s protagonist faces and negotiates the night of 23rd of November and her positionality in it.   

Blame, responsibility, apathy, guilt, and finally justice are just some of the concerns Delecroix’s humble in length and ambitious in scope novel proposes to trace. And although the text attempts to resolve some, itquickly loses sight of the others. As the audience follows the protagonist’s perspective, who, in the manner of an internal monologue, recounts the investigation she has been subjected to, they perpetually waver between disbelief, compassion, disgust, fear and self-identification. Since little to no narrative space is given to the investigator (whose physical resemblance to herself strikes Small Boat’s protagonist), her figure as well as the stubbornly contested process of examination produce the opportunity for the woman’s inner conflict to unfold.   

What kind of responsibility does an individual take up in the midst of a political tragedy? Ponders the text by centering the officer’s investigation on her abused duty to help those at the sea. The text insists on her singular unfulfilled responsibility to assist while simultaneously retracts to locate her seeming insignificance in the root problems of forced migration. “So back we came to me again, and the idea that the cause of their death was — me. In other words, not the sea, not migration policy, not the trafficking mafia, not the war in Syria or the famine in Sudan — me.” As the character continues the narrative strategy of displacing herself from the chain of events, she mistakes it for complete erasure of complicity. It is in such instances that Delecroix masterfully crafts a scene of confusion – indeed, the naval officer cannot be blamed for the trafficking mafia and the war in Syria, or the migration policy as such but remains undeniably responsible, the reader is instructed to remember, for her incapacity of asserting action in the here and now.   

Writing about Carola Rackete, the ship captain who illegally docked a rescue boat to the  Italian island of Lampedusa’s coast instead of enacting a pushback on the 53 rescued from the sea, Mario Vargas Llosa proposes “When the law is immoral and inhumane disobeying it becomes a moral obligation”. Although moral obligation asserts itself far from an act of heroism, its realized scarcity undeniably maintains it as such. Delecroix ponders not the nature of those willing to help, and those that do – the heroes, but rather, those who for one reason or another choose not to or happen not to do so. And so Small Boat negotiates the reality of its character in such tone further inquiring, What sort of subject refuses to help those in need?  

Delecroix negotiates the French naval officer as an impossible monster, – “I guess saying that I had a little girl and that she was the apple of my eye, that I was a good mother who had commendably looked after her when her father had left the conjugal home, and that I looked after my elderly parents — I guess that wasn’t enough, since the guards in the concentration camps loved their families too.”, and desensitized worker, “All of which enables me to become exactly what I should be, that is a function, not an individual or a person but a function — about as personal, or individual, as a mathematical unit or a mass-produced tin-opener”. He argues for empathy as a site of privilege, “Empathy I said to the police inspector, is an idiotic luxury indulged in by people who do nothing, and who are moved by the spectacle of suffering” and imagination as an unsustainable distraction, “At the start, I had too much imagination and if you have too much imagination you’re done for. All the misery of the world can come crashing down on you, it keeps you awake at night.” Delecroix’s novel finds no resolution for the question it undertakes, and its character, no recluse away from the guilt and conscience she experiences during the investigation and in its aftermath. The final parts of Small Boat give us a glimpse into the character’s own tragedy, haunted by the memories of the event of November 23 and the weight of her responsibility, committing, in an inappropriate and metaphorically dubious final scene, suicide by drowning.  

Covering the text’s tripartite structure I have so far omitted its middle section which has taken me over a week to approach and which once I had finally gathered the capacity to read, I did so in one tense sitting. The second segment of Small Boat fragments the textual discourse, its sudden narrative shift – from the call operator, to that of one of the drowning men on the boat realizes Delecroix’s initial goal for the novel – to make us see again, imagine the lived experiences behind glanced over headlines. Delecroix’s incentive is ethically sincere but its execution remains  rather perverse and critically-limited.   

Spanning just seventeen pages the second part traces the boarding on the dinghy, the realization of its permeability the urgent calls, anxious awaiting for pledged assistance, the resisted fall into the sea and the process of drowning spanning over a few tortuous hours in the freezing November water. The group of characters whose tragedy he attempts to illuminate fails to be constructed away from its victimhood. Delecroix lacks not the imagination, but rather the criticality to assess the purpose of his narrative. Reduced to struggling, drowning bodies who in spurges of consciousness dream of “one day working in a British supermarket”, Delecroix’s charactersbecome not much more than empathy-evoking figures appearing in-textually just so that the novel can realize its moral teaching. Because does seeing, and in the case of Delecroix – seeing the imagined, really account for understanding? Is there not something autoerotic and pitiful in the consumption of images of suffering under the guise of co-experience and sympathy? As Sontag asserts, “We truly can’t imagine what it was like. We can’timagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes. Can’t understand, can’t imagine.” What does Delecroix’s speculation on the horrid abandonment and death at sea activates then if anything at all?  

In “Venus in Two Acts”, Sadiya Hartman utilizes a method similar to that found in Small Boat. Hartman’s critical fabulation, which she herself deems an impossible mission, narrates imaginatively alongside criticalarchival engagement, the lives of women subjugated to Transatlantic slavery. While writing she asks, “And what do stories afford anyway? A way of living in the world in the aftermath of catastrophe and devastation? A home in the world for the mutilated and violated self? For whom—for us or for them?” One thing is clear, Delecroix audience is alive and most likely well, indulging in the text, as a re-affirming act of sympathy, conscience, politicaldisapproval and exercise in moral philosophy. Another? In its grand gesture of evoking imagination as a site of remembrance Vincent’s Delecroix’s Small Boat forgets perhaps that an adequate way to remember is not to ponderbut articulate outwardly, at least the names it seeks to commemorate:  

Shakar Ali Pirot, Hadiya Rzgar Hussein, Hati Rzgar Hussein, Mubin Rzgar Hussein, Kazhal Ahmed Khidhir, Rezhwan Yasin Hassan, Zanyar Mustafa Mina, Mohammed Quadir Aulla, Pshtiwan Rasul  Farka, Twana MamandMohammed, Mohammed Hussein Mohammed, ‘Harem’ Serkat Perot Muhammad, Hassan Mohammed Ali, Sirwan Alipour, Maryam Nuri Mohamed Amin, Mhabad Ahmad Ali,‘Deniz’ Afrasia Ahmed Mohammed, BilindShukir Baker, ‘Hybar’ Bryar Hamad Abdulrahman, Muslim Ismael Hamad.  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ksenia Kwiecińska (she/her) studies Comparative Literature at Utrecht University and works as an editor at See All This. She is interested in diasporic and migration writing; poetics of borderlands and politics of memory in particular, loves reading celebrity gossip and the poetry of Louise Glück.