Reviewed by: Arbre de l’oubli by Nancy Huston E. Nicole Meyer Huston, Nancy. Arbre de l’oubli. Actes Sud, 2021 ISBN 978-2-330-14691-7. Pp. 320. Seeking to understand her identity, Shayna must face not only her own past, but that of her parents, as well as that of her maternal and paternal grandparents. The latter, having escaped the fate of most of their families, who were murdered in the Holocaust, pass on a desperate desire to continue the family lineage along with their profound grief and loss. Both family story and history challenge the possibility of a future generation, however, and further complicate Shayna’s quest to understand and accept herself. Readers may recognize parallels with the multigenerational exploration of a family whose past also reveals complex interwoven threads of religion, violence, lies, incest, rage, friendship and love that characterize Huston’s Lignes de faille, recipient of the Prix Femina (2006). While fissures split multiple generations of Shayna’s family, this novel surpasses the previous novel in fascinating ways, in part due to Huston’s love for researching complex social and historical events and new places, and in part because of its continually interwoven narratives. While the Shoah opens the family breach, Shayna’s anguish derives from other sources as well. Her mother’s infertility causes her Jewish father to pay a poverty-stricken single African-American mother to provide her own egg and to carry his child. Shayna’s dark skin, frizzy hair and voluptuous body cause her much torment among the “Beiges” as her world is devoid of “Marrons,” with whom she can identify. Her rage targets primarily Lili Rose who questions her own identity as mother, given the lack of genetic contribution to her child. Much like the structure of the novel itself, Shayna’s rage spirals inward. Ouagadougou, 2016 opens the novel which shares Shayna’s visit to Ouaga, site of the titular tree, where future slaves performed a ritual of forgetting before heading to the aptly named “porte du Non-Retour.” Short sections composed of Shayna’s thoughts graphically presenting her rage through their capitalized font divide the novel’s multiple narrative threads. First comes her father’s birth family (Bronx, 1945), second, that of her protestant mother’s original family (Nashua, 1955– 1960), third, their mutual home in which Shayna lives (Manhattan, 1994), and finally, the short capitalized section. This pattern continues in vertiginous fashion, until locations converge to being that of Manhattan, and the family narratives to that of her parents and that of Shayna, followed by the block in capital letters of her thoughts filled with the pounding sounds of beating drums and women slaves being publicly and continually raped by their “beige” masters, who steal their “marron” children from their mothers at birth. Descending into madness, a chance encounter gives Shayna hope and changes her path. “Germer vaut mieux que gémir” (305), states her lover and we arrive at both the end of the novel and at its beginning. The novel’s movement, be it of time, narrative, or form produces its spectacular originality, making it a must-read. [End Page 247] E. Nicole Meyer Augusta University (GA) Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Apr 1, 2022
Curt Hersey 
Open Access