Nestor rend les armes by Clara Dupont-Monod

Abstract

to be indicted, and who would be convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to thirty-five years in prison in July 2010. That trial provides Deville with his principal narrative thread, around which he weaves an impressive variety of other stories. That of the French Mekong Expedition in 1866–68, lead by Ernest Doudart de Lagrée and Francis Garnier, for instance; or that of Vann Nath, who survived the Khmer Rouge camps by painting portraits of Pol Pot; or that of Marie-Charles David de Mayréna, who declared himself King of Sedang in 1888; or that of Pol Pot himself, who returned to Phnom Penh after his studies in Paris in order to teach Vigny, Verlaine, and Rimbaud, and whose clandestine activity eventually resulted in his being named Prime Minister of Democratic Kampuchea. The regime that he presided was a short-lived one, lasting only three years, eight months, and twenty days, yet it left a very bloody legacy. Deville points out, however, that it was not an utterly exceptional one when considered against the backdrop of a century when mass slaughter was commonplace : “On pourrait les oublier, les Khmers rouges. Qu’ils crèvent dans leurs cellules climatisées. Un ou deux millions de morts en quatre ans. Pas même le record du siècle. Six millions dans les camps nazis. Vingt au goulag. Cinquante peut-être dans la Chine de Mao” (252). The central—and most difficult—question that Deville asks in Kampuchéa is how to come to terms with such a reality, how to begin to comprehend a phenomenon that, by virtue of its gravity and sheer dimensions, benumbs us. In order to see how a utopian ideal produces a murderous state, he gazes at his subjects through different lenses, from various vantage points. He considers the way that Cambodia has always had to fend off its envious neighbors. He reflects upon the European colonization of the region known as “Indochina,” and on the rich literary tradition that it inspired, from Pierre Loti and Joseph Conrad to André Malraux and Graham Greene. Moving up the Mekong River in a sampan, he thinks about the relation of geography and history, and about the way that individual people take their place in a far broader panorama of events. Reading the Khmer writer Soth Polin, he wonders about the uses of literature. In Deville’s view, such an undertaking demands a new kind of narrative form. If he calls this book a novel, he does so at a time when the horizon of possibility of that genre is constantly in question (one thinks of the recent work of Jean Rolin, Jean Echenoz, Lydie Salvayre, Olivier Rolin, Marie Cosnay, Iegor Gran, and Emmanuel Carrère, for example). That questioning is intended to restructure and reinvigorate our manners of writing and reading, to be sure; but what is also at issue, clearly, is the way we understand our world. University of Colorado Warren Motte DUPONT-MONOD, CLARA. Nestor rend les armes. Paris: Sabine Wespieser, 2011. ISBN 978-2-84805-100-0. Pp. 117. 15 a. The major question of this novel may appear to be: “Voir comment un homme parvient à vivre en étant gros, seul et laid” (50). In fact it is more a symptom than a cause of the main character’s problems. Nestor is fat, yet continues to eat compulsively. His bulimia and accompanying depression at first seem to stem from a series of tragedies. As a young man he was driven from his native Reviews 413 Argentina by a right-wing coup. Later his infant daughter drowned due to a moment of distraction on the part of his wife, Mélina. She in turn falls victim to an accident that leaves her for weeks in a vegetative state until she finally dies. While his wife lies comatose, Nestor is befriended by a doctor, Alice, who finds in the man’s suffering and withdrawal from life an echo of her own emotional repression . The novel chronicles Nestor’s deepening alienation and physical dissolution , culminating in his death. The name “Nestor” is common in Hispanic culture, and perhaps it has no significance besides identifying the person...