When Waters Rise and Birds No Longer Sing: L’Absence d’oiseaux d’eau by Emmanuelle Salasc

This article offers an ecocritical reading of Emmanuelle Salasc’s L’Absence d’oiseaux d’eau (2010). I show how water functions in the novel as a metaphor for desire and love, while also metonymically depicting rising water levels as a symptom of climate change. Analyzing the sudden absence of these metaphors, I contend that the novel metafictionally internalizes the effects of the climate crisis and formally reflects the epistemological uncertainty of the Anthropocene. Ultimately, I argue that by rendering romance environmentally, Salasc also represents romantic loss in the novel as environmental loss, making it a commentary on our fraught relationship with the natural environment.