The beach as a space for intimate writing in Alan Pauls’ Barefoot life

The beach motif has been explored many times in literature: from Proust to Camus, it has often embodied a place of interaction between a character’s internalised experience and the reality of the outside world. In this round trip between the intimate and the collective, Alan Pauls uses the beach as a tool for autobiographical writing, thus creating a real “phenomenology” of the beach and revealing in his text a stratified and textured meta-literature, like the grains of sand in which the swimmer’s feet sink. The beach becomes a multidimensional space that allows him to dissect his plural identity and reconnect with the memories of a childhood spent in Argentina in the sixties and seventies. Pauls sets up this spatio-temporality particularly through visual memory and a play on images, whether directly through his writing or by inserting photographs and cinematographic references. Barefoot life is both a dive into the depths of the mind and a serene siesta in the quicksands of intimacy. Pauls takes us on a journey of discovery of his self in a story that takes us like the wave and lets us float in the spume of our own lives