Le cœur synthétique par Chloé Delaume

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le cœur synthétique par Chloé Delaume Deborah Gaensbauer Delaume, Chloé. Le cœur synthétique. Seuil, 2020. ISBN 978-2-142545-1. Pp. 208. Delaume's novel, awarded the 2020 Prix Médicis, continues in the fourth-wave feminist vein of her 2016 novel Les sorcières de la République and her 2019 manifesto Mes bien chères sœurs, although it tempers the exuberant style of the earlier works. Concerned in Le cœur with directing her feminist message at a broader audience, Delaume traces the vicissitudes of the synthetic heart of Adelaïde Berthel, a Parisian publicist, in a mostly straightforward linear narrative. At age 46, anticipating exhilarating independence, Adelaïde divorces her husband only to experience stunning isolation as a "produit obsolète" (43). This "fleur bleue qu'on trempe dans l'acide"—an autofictional reference to the fragile young Chloé in Boris Vian's L'écume des jours from whom Delaume has taken her pen name—chafes at solitude and the confines of the small apartment she can afford as a single woman (13). Delaume launches the ludic intertextuality that permeates the novel by entitling the first chapter "Une chambre à soi." Poking fun at her heroine's superficial struggle with insufficient storage space for her extensive wardrobe, Delaume simultaneously salutes Virginia Woolf's feminist agenda. Adelaïde's dependence on a new partner to resolve her social invalidation and real estate problems confronts statistical evidence—in variations that echo throughout the novel to forlornly comic effect—that marital prospects for a Parisian woman in her forties are dismal: "13 700 femmes célibataires de plus que les hommes," enough to fill "les Arènes de Béziers" (42). In a sustained lampoon of the publishing world, Delaume compounds the endless humiliations of hunting for a spouse with Adelaïde's frustration with her career. At Éditions David Séchard, where female assistants "pullulent comme au temps des sténos" in support of the men in power, "Adelaïde ne sait plus qui elle est […] à force d'être devenue […] la voix des autres" (12). Salvation from the multilayered identity crises eventually comes by way of an adopted cat, social media, and the support and occasionally bungled sorcery of four women friends, including a 47-year-old writer named Clotilde whose eccentric autofictional titles parody Delaume's. There is risk of tedium and occasional chick-lit banality in this drawn-out saga. It dissipates, however, in the poetic rhythms of Delaume's prose (alexandrins abound), the sardonic, albeit surprisingly tender humor, and the threading of her vision of sorority through iconic feminist works. The novel concludes with another literary appropriation. The final chapter, in which an elderly Adelaïde, cured of "épousité aiguë," shares a house and an artistic cooperative with her friends and parties with abandon, is entitled "Les guérillères." Equating her octogenarians' resistance to devaluing masculine mores with the epic battle for freedom staged by a tribe of women warriors in Monique Wittig's Les guérillères, Delaume elicits the kind of freeing laughter that is also key to women's success in both novels. Ludically reminding readers that battles like Adelaïde's can be revolutionary as well as winnable, Delaume's latest paean to sisterhood effectively argues that "[i]l n'y a que l'amitié ou la sororité qui préservent de l'abîme" (195). [End Page 258] Deborah Gaensbauer Regis University (CO), emerita Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French