The premise for Antoinette’s Fish was inspired by a number of different, seemingly unremarkable events and factoids that all came together at just the right moment.
First is me. It’s unremarkable that I grew up in Maine, and have a fascination with Africa. Everybody grew up somewhere, and everyone is intrigued by something.
Second, is the 300 liter aquarium my husband keeps. At the beginning of our relationship I thought his fish were little more than an expensive hobby that took too much of his precious time away from me. But as I got to know them, I became more interested. They are all from Lake Tanganyika, and they all have very strong personalities. We have three happy couples, a pair of neolamprologus brevis, who sleep in a shell, and a pair of altolamprologus compressiceps, who are the biggest but always hide, and a pair of neolamprologus tretocephalus, who eat snails. They must be French. There are also 4 eretmodus cyanosticus (clown fish) who smile a lot, and a harem of cyprichromis leptosoma, led by a rather lascivious male who we’ve named Casanova.
Third is the fact that I now live in France, and my language skills are far from perfect. To train my ear, I download French podcasts and listen to them while I walk. One of these podcasts is a radio show called 2000 Ans d’Histoire (2000 Years of History) from France Inter. One unremarkable day, I was walking to the supermarket, listening to a story about a French explorer named Guillaume de Monfried. He’d been all over the world in the beginning of the 20th century, and was famous enough to have a movie made about him. The interview was with his grandson, who never met the man. On the day that the grandson (as a child) was finally going to meet his eccentric, explorer grandfather, the old man disappeared.
And the final unremarkable inspiration that tied everything together came from a dinner conversation with friends who told us about their adventures SCUBA diving in the Red Sea. I had never imagined people doing SCUBA anywhere but in the ocean, and the thought of it rather blew my mind.
A few eyes of newt, powdered frog hearts, and a lot of typing, and there you go. Antoinette’s Fish.
