Lamothe-Cadillac: sa jeunesse en France by Beverly Matherne

Abstract

piece: solitude; creation and history (where they collide, they truly leave victims); the role of music (can it be squashed by a totalitarian régime?). Discovering somewhat more of the protagonist’s personality, the reader learns she has a failed marriage behind her, due in part to her insouciance. She tries too hard to please; she is pathologically anorexic; she talks far too much. She repeats ad nauseam many expressions, and it is less than clear whether she is the pianist’s muse, or simply an annoyance, and whether there is another woman, imagined or not, who is really the pianist’s inspiration. When a novel’s back page blurb uses a lengthy quote from the novel followed by an incomprehensible summary sentence, odds are the book is problematic. Lefebvre, to add to the confusion created by her monumentally long sentences, creates her own vocabulary (“violonistiques,” “tennistiques,” anticapitalistique”); throws about literary and musical celebrities such as Mann, Brecht, Proust, Flaubert, Beethoven, Mozart, and Wagner; adds a pinch of the erudite with “humérus,” “radius,” and “cubitus;” repeats “bonheur collectif,” “la désinvolture,” and “éducation” much too often; mentions products only a select few would have knowledge of such as “Dim ups”, and shows off a musical vocabulary again limited to the few with “scherzo,” “sol bémol,” and “triolet.” This, coupled with the German expressions as well as the English ones, makes this reader wonder if the author was more interested in impressing than in writing impressive literature. It is recommended that she pursue her scholarly articles and leave the path of fiction. Millburn H.S., N.J. emerita Davida Brautman MATHERNE, BEVERLY. Lamothe-Cadillac: sa jeunesse en France (Suite de poèmes en prose en français et en anglais) / Lamothe-Cadillac: His Early Life in France (Written in linked prose poems in French and English). Shreveport, LA: Tintamarre, 2009. ISBN 978-0-9820558-2-3. Pp. 120. $13.50. In 2001, amidst a wave of landmark anniversaries of the French presence in the Western Hemisphere, Louisiana-born poet Beverly Matherne traveled to southwestern France to conduct field research coinciding with the tercentennial of the founding of Detroit by Antoine Laumet de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac. Matherne’s interest in the life of this adventurer and colonial official led to this bilingual collection of prose poems. Under the apparent simplicity of a biographical portrait lies, in crisp, polished vignettes, the psychosocial germ of the French colonial project in North America. Matherne’s writings have often borne witness to the rawness of childhood experience, drawing powerfully from her own memories of growing up in a rural Cajun community near New Orleans. A resident of northern Michigan, where she teaches creative writing, Matherne would seem to signal a departure with Lamothe-Cadillac, other than geographic affiliation and her commitment to American Francophonie. However, as in earlier works, the problem of memory, both personal and cultural, haunts Matherne’s poetic imagination . Popular recollection typically resurrects figures from colonial history as either intrepid explorers or ruthless glory-seekers. The career of Lamothe-Cadillac embodies both myths. Born Antoine Laumet in 1658 to a Gascon bourgeois family, he clearly sought opportunity in New France. From trapper and trader in Acadie, he became fort commander at Michillimakinac, established Fort Détroit, and Reviews 203 eventually served as governor of Louisiana. In a less flattering light, LamotheCadillac was criticized for his dealings with indigenous peoples, imprisoned for illegal trafficking in 1704, and removed from his position in Louisiana because of personal conflicts. The forty prose poems comprising Lamothe-Cadillac delve into a period less fettered by historical record. Each text, presented in French and English on facing pages, depicts a scene from the protagonist’s youth. These episodes cover his birth and boyhood in the village of Saint-Nicolas, schooling, family activities, religious celebrations, coming-of-age passions, and the beginnings of his military career before his journey to Acadie. Matherne’s recreation of seventeenth-century French life recalls the sumptuous precision of Baroque realism. This verisimilitude reflects her research in France, be it through descriptions of food, clothing (as in Antoine’s admiration of a noble’s “feutre à larges bords garnis de plumes d...