Libertango par Frédérique Deghelt

Abstract

Jesus conveys a loveliness and innocence and Mary Cassatt’s baby boys often reflect an incipient ambition, Mordersohn-Becker’s little girls seem weighed down in a contemplation , whose exact nature, due again to the eyes, is never quite clear. It could be the grim future, which most likely awaits these children from poor backgrounds, or perhaps their somber faces reflect a much too young awareness of the normal difficulties and disillusionments that await them in life. Modersohn-Becker’s women and children often appear to be less individuals than types as she provides a variety of images conveying her personal sense of what it meant to be a woman at the dawn of the twentieth century. Florida State University, emeritus William Cloonan Deghelt, Frédérique. Libertango. Arles: Actes Sud, 2016. ISBN 978-2-330-06329-0. Pp. 304. 22,50 a. Deghelt infuses her novel about a great conductor with a realism evoked in part by reference to figures of renown on the international music scene and to familiar social and political events spanning the life of its fictional protagonist. This richly developed detail pulls the story away from becoming a fable of untrained“genius”that inexplicably achieves artistic productivity and fame. The story: Luis Nilta-Bergo, born in 1935, grows up in Paris, his Spanish parents having fled Franco’s repressive regime. An only son, Luis finds no favor with his family for reasons of a congenital hemiplegia that hampers his mobility and his speech. His parents respond to his disability with undisguised repulsion and shame; his elder sister treats him with cruelty; only a younger sister discreetly expresses affection for him. Years of schooling confirm his status as resident pariah and scapegoat. Luis compensates for his isolation by retreating into the music he can capture on an old radio. These ill-starred beginnings and their profound effect on Luis’s psyche never quite fade from his life, but his focused attention to music enhances an exceptional ability to hear the distinctiveness of sound and silence in music and to feel in a non-physical realm what music can create. The narrative then follows Luis’s journey from uncanny hearer of music to gifted conductor, without traditional training as instrumentalist or even as vocalist. At his lowest point in youth, Luis serendipitously meets a down-and-out Astor Piazzolla who encourages his musicality (the novel’s title thus references an exquisite tango of Piazzolla’s). Later, Luis learns to listen to and coach pianists under the tutelage of Nadia Boulanger. He plucks what education he can from the rigidly codified training of the Paris Conservatoire, training he challenges by also indulging in jazz performances. He is mentored by no less than Sergiu Celibidache, the great Rumanian conductor, and eventually comes up with the idea for an Orchestre du monde that will bring great music to the suffering masses around the world, express solidarity, and alleviate however briefly their pain. This project is, of course, rooted directly in his own experience: 268 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 269 “[La musique] était ce qui échappait à nos âmes chevillées à notre corps, notre liberté d’être nu, d’être immatériel, enfin libre”(205). This fictionalized“biography”requires vigilance on the reader’s part. One must follow a chronology scrambled by association and memory and further broken up by a variety of forms (letters, journal entries, film interviews) and different narrators (Luis, a documentary filmmaker, an omniscient narrator).Additionally, there is that familiar difficulty of translating one medium into another (music into text). As the descriptors of music Deghelt uses are non-technical and intentionally allude to the ineffable, she sometimes risks losing us in recondite descriptions of Luis’s music. On balance, she demonstrates that the ineffable can be far from ineffective on human well-being. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Ernaux, Annie. Mémoire de fille. Paris: Gallimard, 2016. ISBN 978-2-07-014597-3. Pp. 160. 15 a. Durant l’été 58, la jeune Annie Duchêne, âgée de 19 ans et monitrice de colonie de vacances, vit un éveil à la sexualité désastreux. Elle s’abandonne au désir d’un Autre sans comprendre...