Bad Girl par by Nancy Huston

Abstract

protagonist, is an unpretentiously beautiful book, one attuned to the emotional possibilities of the exquisitely-trained human voice. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Huston, Nancy. Bad Girl. Paris: Actes Sud, 2014. ISBN 978-2-330-03718-5. Pp. 264. 20 a. For those who have already read Huston’s works the literary rigor, analytical character development, and cross-cultural perspectives of this book will come as no surprise. Not only are the characters realistic; they are real. Real people.And into what genre can we place Bad Girl? Is it an autobiography or a narrative? A soliloquy? A monologue? Or is it an exorcism? Perhaps Bad Girl, with its discreet subtitle Classes de littérature, is all of the above. Let us call it a récit, a broken chronological recounting of the author’s life told to her foetal self, the not-yet-born Nancy Huston, whom she names “Dorrit”. Through the insightful reading of her own trajectory and with narrative expertise which comes from much practice, Huston allows us to see how she became who she is today: a voracious reader, a prolific writer, a bilingual, bicultural, bi-continental being. This English-speaking Canadian who has spent her adult life in France writes in magnificent French about trauma and exile, joy and empathy, closeness and great distances. Using “tu” throughout, Huston tells Dorrit of the experiences that await her. In the future tense she announces events, feelings, discoveries, and losses that lie ahead. Temporality has few boundaries here and along with the true chronology from the 1950s through the present there are fragments that skip about in time. Much of the storyline focuses on the instability of Huston’s family life, including multiple moves, her father’s erratic behavior and the ultimate betrayal from which she suffers when her mother leaves the family to pursue a life elsewhere. Hence the main title, for Huston imagines the abandonment to be her fault: “Oui, tu mérites tout le malheur qui t’arrive, bad girl, même si tu ne sais pas pourquoi” (251). Is this a term that carries so much weight that it must be left in the author’s native language? Perhaps. The basic story is punctuated with asides ranging from commentary on abortion to children’s songs and family games, interspersed with histories of past generations and tales heard told. These ever-present references to language and writing remind us that this is far more than the telling of the future to someone from the past. Let us not forget the subtitle Classes de littérature. From moving house to piano lessons, from the discovery of her own loveliness to relationships with men, from the divorce that shattered her world to the joys of her life as a writer, Huston considers her experiences to be her classes de littérature: “[É]crire reflétera ton besoin de gouverner seule” (207). People fail to live up to expectations. Words, on the other hand, carry in their very existence a strength upon which Huston draws to survive.And 272 FRENCH REVIEW 89.2 Reviews 273 the reader in all this? Far from being a self-indulgent self-exploration, this récit highlights the importance of literature in our lives. It shows us with elegance and gentle humor how we construct stories to make sense out of chaos and how this helps us chart our course. Metropolitan State University of Denver Ann Williams Jouannais, Jean-Yves. Les barrages de sable. Paris: Grasset, 2014. ISBN 978-2-24685197 -4. Pp. 204. 17 a. A long meditation about building sand castles and their analogy to military defense, the narrative moves amoeba-like into various genres. It represents serious inquiry, using citations of writers from ancient, medieval to modern times. The book reads at times like a personal journal, at times like a treatise, and at times like a novel. The text begins like a novel in which a father is supervising the playtime of his two young children on a beach as they build a dam in the sand against the Atlantic. Explaining the movement of tides, his thoughts wander to ancient writers and to Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic...