Sous le voile par Hélène Lenoir

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sous le voile par Hélène Lenoir Warren Motte Lenoir, Hélène. Sous le voile. Grasset, 2022. ISBN 978-2-246-82091-8. Pp. 216. In her prefatory note, Hélène Lenoir mentions that this book was inspired by a notebook that her mother had kept as a novice nun in the Catholic order of Notre-Dame de Sion, an experience that her mother very rarely mentioned in her subsequent life. It shortly becomes clear, however, that Lenoir's principal purpose is not to give a faithful account of her mother's novitiate, for Sous le voile is a novel, a fiction constructed with a great deal of canniness and creative skill. Those are qualities that Lenoir possesses in abundance, and which she has displayed amply during the course of her career, since her debut in the mid-1990s. The protagonist of this novel is Sœur Jeanne Marie. She is eighty-six years old in the narrative "now," and she tells her story from memory, a memory that is more fragile by the day. Her life in the order is submitted to the "Règle," a stern and unforgiving code of conduct calling for obedience, abnegation, and silence. Yet she points out that such a code was hardly necessary, because each of the nuns already possessed an internal disposition toward restriction: "on avait ça en nous, une espèce de rappel à l'ordre instinctif" (18). As Sœur Jeanne Marie narrates her story late in life, she makes up for the silence she was forced to observe during her novitiate, and this unfettered, uninterrupted speech is one of the most compelling aspects of the novel. It is all the more intriguing insofar as on the face of things, there is very little to tell, or at least very little that would seem to appeal in conventional narrative terms. "La routine quotidienne est la même que l'année précédente" (97), Sœur Jeanne Marie notes, as if in excuse. But of course that is the point of the cloistered life. It is also one of the points that Hélène Lenoir wishes to make: in describing a world so banal and apparently devoid of event, with such insistence and close focus, the smallest detail takes on rare pungency. Having entered the order during the war years, in 1941, Sœur Jeanne Marie is obliged to leave it, against her will, nine years later. Sadly unequipped for civilian life, she suffers from depression and comes under the care of a neuropsychiatrist. From that moment onward her existence will become more eventful—but not in ways one might have anticipated. Lenoir navigates that transition with considerable aplomb. The narrative voice changes from first person singular to third person; point of view shifts in interesting ways; the novel in a sense comes into its own. As for Sœur Jeanne Marie, she has now become Jeanne Delalande, but whether she has likewise come into her own is a question that remains largely open. That openness is a crucial aspect of Hélène Lenoir's strategy as she brings Sous le voile to a close, not with a narrative pirouette, but instead with the suggestion that this is a story to be continued. [End Page 237] Warren Motte University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French