Le siècle des nuages by Philippe Forest

Abstract

sont des enfants qu’on a très jeune”). The cliché holds well enough, especially in the early chapters in which the narrator relates how her mother slips into increasing dependence on her daughter. True to her training as an essayist, Fontanel writes in short bursts of anecdote complemented with musing. These vignettes about the elderly mother often begin with a health issue (a fall, a trip to the emergency room, confinement to bed) as though to underscore the incremental retreat from life. But the narrator also catalogs her mother’s small triumphs of spirit. A favorite chapter of mine recounts a night spent in the rehabilitation ward of a nursing home. As an appropriately wintry dusk falls, two elderly denizens of the nursing home, one with a walker, the other with a shabby holdall, wander the halls in search of an exit. One of them inquires with more old-fashioned courtesy than most of us could muster: “Auriez-vous l’extrême obligeance de nous indiquer la sortie, s’il vous plaît?” (63). Samuel Beckett would surely have seen the dramatic potential in such a scene; Fontanel, however, uses it as a measure of the mother’s inner conflict. The mother sees these genteel specters both as an incursion into her life—and probably a harbinger of her future status—but also as two beings worthy of respectful acknowledgment. Moreover, she recognizes the value of transmitting such human experience (“Écris-le,” [63] she exhorts her daughter). Beyond exploring the reversed parent-child relationship, the narrator strikes upon a few discoveries about herself. She takes note of the incongruous directions in which her life is dragging her as she shuttles between the world of haute couture and various healthcare facilities, between professionalism and filial duty, between success and love. Bobbing just beneath the surface of self-deprecating descriptions of herself as ridiculously dressed either for one venue or the other are the harder questions we ask ourselves in those existentialist pauses: what have I accomplished in my life? Whom and how well do I love? How much can I give without taking? These moments are handled—thankfully—with a light touch. Grandir does not have the starkness or the depth of Simone de Beauvoir’s Une mort très douce, a hallmark of the daughter-mother genre. On the other hand, Fontanel achieves a bittersweetness lacking in Beauvoir’s book, especially when the maternal character in decline makes observations about life that can still astonish and sustain her daughter. A tender, wise little book. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March FOREST, PHILIPPE. Le siècle des nuages. Paris: Gallimard, 2010. ISBN 978-2-07-012986-7. Pp. 556. 21,50 a. On its simplest level Le siècle des nuages is a survey of the twentieth century as refracted through the history of French aviation. If the airplane is one of the defining images of that century, the narrator’s father, a World War II fighter pilot and later a commercial aviator ought to be the symbol of the new man. Yet this new man remains remarkably similar to the old one. A good person, courageous, patriotic and religious, the father rallies to De Gaulle during the war, and, in an effort to best serve his country, he becomes at various moments a foot soldier, paratrooper, and a pilot, all without ever experiencing a moment of combat! After the war he works as an Air France aviator, eventually becoming the company ’s chief pilot. Then he retires, and one day falls dead in the street while walking his dog. Forest’s strategy of making his hero (explicitly modeled on his Reviews 593 father) such an average fellow opens the novel to a broad meditation on the meaning of history. For Forest history is something we are most often unaware of as we live it, and its mercurial nature is further complicated by the works of professional historians who inevitably provide a somewhat simplified, occasionally sanitized version of what happened and why. It is at this juncture that fiction becomes important, not because it provides clarity, but rather because it reintroduces the sloppy, the aleatory, the absurd to events experienced...