Paris-Brest by Tanguy Viel

Abstract

^Hfl ^Thovs7 the soldie^^B^ HMrepairs ^1 ^Hjfl the gramophone l; ^^MH tenyears he attempts to reachher by ^^^^H letter andphone. ^^|^H Nationalist Serbia teaches ^^B?H Aleksandarthat"mySerbian blood was contaminated by my Bosniak ^^B^H mother/' while TV news portrays ^^B^H those who defendedVisegrad as the aggressors. The family thus ^^^^H emigrates to Essen, where Aleksan ^^^^H dar masters his environment but ^^^^H observes, "Ifanyone says I'm a good ^^^^^1 example of integration, it really ^^^^^H freaks me out." ^^^^H In 2002, his parents resettled in ^^^^^B Florida,theartist of the Unfinished returns toVisegrad to seek and offer closure. Now Aleksandar realizes that "a good story ... is like our ^^^^H river Drina. But one thing neither theDrina nor stories can do: there's ^^^^H no going back for any of them." ^^^^^1 As hisphoneringsintherainand Asija speaks his name, Aleksandar ^^^^H concretizes the linkbetween his sto ^^^^H ries and theDrina: "I have my own ^^^^H rainy river Drina now. ..." And ^^^^^1 ifhe cannot change the fate of his ^^^^H family, friends, or city, themagic ^^^^H of his stories offers them a kind of ^^^^H resurrection. That German can create new nouns with metaphoric power from two conjoined enhances themagic realist quality of the original,while theEnglish text reads more prosai cally: forZauberhut, "magic hat," for meine einegeRegen-Drina, "my own rainy riverDrina." Yet like theorigi nal, this generally faithfulEnglish translationshapes a haunting collage of twentieth-century Yugoslavia, its sharply etched fragments evoking both theSouth Slav diaspora and the history ofmodern Visegrad, a richly texturedworld again destroyed by fratricide. Michele Levy North CarolinaA&T University Tanguy Viel. Paris-Brest. Paris. Minuit. 2009. 190 pages. 14. isbn 978-2-7073 2063-6 The narrator of Paris-Brest, Tanguy Viel's fifth novel for theEditions de Minuit, is an anonymous figure? literally so until page 156, where his mother finally calls him by his name, "Louis." He leaves Brest for Paris with 100,000 ill-gotten francs in his suitcase; he returns to Brest fromParis several years laterwith 175 hard-won manuscript pages of a "family novel." His fathermay have stolen 14million francs from a professional soccer clubwhere he was employed; his grandmother cer tainly married 18million francs. Family relations and the money that vexes them are constantly at issue in Paris-Brest, as if each ges ture, each word exchanged with one's kin had a specific, nonnego tiable cost. In Louis's bookkeeping, moreover, those costs are always entered in the debit column, rather than the credit.This is a family that would have delighted Tolstoy, or Gide. It is peopled by characters who are either toxic orweak; there is no middle ground here. Louis is bound up in the familydynamic as ifina straightjacket.The only person he frequents outside of that circle is "the Kermeur boy," a saturnine youthwith the ethics of a pit viper, who comes to serve as Louis's evil genius. To his own way of tHnking at least,Louis is thevector of all of the spite thathis familygenerates. The "family novel" thathe has worked on so diligently during his years in Paris constitutes the only efficient resistance strategy available tohim. In it,he refines the storyof his fam ily life,touching itup here and there, embelUshing itwhen appropriate, making itmore, well, novelistic. Tan guy Viel plays with a great deal of gusto on the tensions that prevail between Louis's novel and Louis's reality, commenting wryly thereby on the uses and abuses of confes sional fiction. Therein lie some of the many pleasures of thismost pleas ing book, one that insistently asks us to reflectupon what thenovel is, and can be. Warren Motte UniversityofColorado Wang Anyi. The Song of Everlast ing Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai. Michael Berry & Susan Chan Egan, trs. David Der-wei Wang, ed. New York. Columbia UniversityPress. 2008. viii + 440 pages. $29.95. isbn 978-0-231- H 14342-4H Certain to takea preeminent place in China's literarycanon,Wang Anyi's The Song of Everlasting Sorrow is at last available in amasterful English translation by Michael Berry and Susan Chan Egan. Firstpublished in 1995, this major work has, like many ofWang's books, waited too long IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIM 64 1 World...