Sans fards, mélanges en l'honneur de Maryse Condé éd. by Laura Carvigan-Cassin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sans fards, mélanges en l'honneur de Maryse Condé éd. by Laura Carvigan-Cassin Lisa Connell Carvigan-Cassin, Laura, éd. Sans fards, mélanges en l'honneur de Maryse Condé. PU des Antilles, 2018. ISBN 979-10-95177-02-9. Pp. 226. For the past forty years, Guadeloupean Maryse Condé has garnered attention as a writer who aims to dismantle assumptions about French Caribbeans and the places they call home. As the title of this collection of seventeen essays suggests, the volume pays homage to the life and work of Condé, whom Lyonel Trouillot, Président de l'Association des Écrivains de la Caraïbe, claims as part of Guadeloupe's "patrimoine symbolique" (13). The book demonstrates Condé's legacy in the French Antilles and the United States in two primary ways. On the one hand, it federates a broad range of contributors from diverse professional backgrounds. Filmmakers, literary scholars, playwrights, and retired teachers present the impact of Condé's work in multiple disciplines and areas of cultural expression, highlighting to good effect the thematic range of Condé's writings. Indeed, the variety of approaches to her work the essayists use, such as race and belonging, the history of slavery, autobiography, and intertextuality, reinforce one of the longstanding characterizations of Condé as an "unclassifiable" writer. The diversity of contributors and the perspectives they bring to bear on her texts thus matches the breadth of voices found in her writings and elegantly parallels a signature feature of her work. On the other hand, the book casts the essayists' task as one that probes the points of contact between Condé's life and her writings without falling into "le piège du biographisme" (13). Different aspects of her life subsequently thread through many of the essays to contextualize analyses of her autofictional texts, as well as the sociocultural conditions that influence how she intervenes in complex questions of racial and national identity not only in the Caribbean, but also on both sides of the Atlantic. This approach clears the path for less traditionally academic analyses of her work that invite readers into some of the paratexts surrounding the author, such as documentary films and interviews. These hybrid dimensions perhaps represent the most original contributions of the book. It offers compelling analyses of several of Condé's well-known books and brings much needed attention to some of her less studied writings, such as her plays and books for children and young adults. Moreover, although Sans fards never explicitly investigates the paratextual materials at the heart of some of the essays or the socio-historical factors that have helped shape the persona of arguably one of the Francophone world's most influential authors, it [End Page 257] amply meets its goal of shedding light on the life of the author without letting her life-story overshadow her work. With its variety of bibliographic references and focused attention to the breadth and depth of her literary career, the volume successfully honors Condé's protean intellectual and artistic contributions to postcolonial and Francophone studies. Scholars of Condé, be they longtime readers or newcomers to her work, will benefit from the contributors' compelling analyses that provide insight into overarching themes of her writings as well as strengthen our understanding of her place in the cultural landscape of the Antilles, mainland France, and the United States. Lisa Connell University of West Georgia Copyright © 2019 American Association of Teachers of French