birth, accompanying his father’s body to its burial place, far from Michel’s former home in Nairobi. The trip is a spiritual and emotional awakening for Pierre, shocked by the banality of the tourists he meets in the opening pages— Audeguy’s lyrical but devastating mockery of the photo safari—people whose understanding of Africa will be limited to their arranged trip to the game reserve of Masai Mara. He soon meets people (friends of his father’s and others) who truly care about Africa, and his childhood passion develops into a profound appreciation of both his father and the continent he loved. Second, through a series of flashbacks we come to know Michel, a soixantehuitard whose idealism and generosity lead him to Kenya, where he founds and directs an NGO devoted to improving the lives of the inhabitants of Nairobi’s enormous slum, Kibera (“forest” or “jungle” in the Nubian language). His attempt to flee Western industrial society is a failure; he learns that Kibera is in fact one of the most flagrant “effets pervers” of globalization. He is continually frustrated by an unsuccessful fight to convince a Dutch horticultural company to practice “fair-trade” farming, a conflict that eventually leads to his death. Finally, the narrator takes us back one hundred years to the construction of the great Kenyan railroad. Begun by the British government in 1896 at Mombasa on the Indian Ocean, the railroad spans 930 km, running northwest through Nairobi to Kisumu on Lake Victoria, extending from there into Uganda and Tanzania. The railroad was completed at a high cost in human casualties—from accidents, tribal warfare, and lion attacks—and it is this deadly aspect of the railroad that the narrator conveys most graphically to the reader. The “Lunatic Express,” as it was called, a simple line on the map, has become metaphorically a “longue cicatrice de la peine des hommes” (148). These are the most eloquent and magical chapters of the novel; here the narrator evokes the long-dead ancestors of twenty-firstcentury Kenya, and the the toll that Britain’s grandiose project took on them. Like Stéphane Audeguy’s first novel, La Théorie des nuages (Gallimard, 2005), Nous autres is in part a reflection on the Occident’s relentless attempt to control nature, to the detriment of the environment and the world’s poorest populations. It is also a meditation on the inability of most Westerners to comprehend the Africa of our imaginations. Walking the streets of Nairobi, Pierre sums up the African enigma by admitting that “il sait bien qu’il n’existe rien qui soit vraiment Afrique, il sait bien que l’Afrique n’existe pas” (56). University of Georgia Jonathan F. Krell AUTISSIER, ISABELLE. Seule la mer s’en souviendra. Paris: Grasset, 2009. ISBN 978-2-24672091 -1. Pp. 280. 18 a. Isabelle Autissier’s Seule la mer s’en souviendra is one of those novels that intimates in its very first sentence an impending disaster that won’t occur until the final pages. The suspense, however, is both bearable and intriguing: Autissier’s long wind-up includes a carefully paced development of the novel’s characters along with the building action. It is 1968, and Peter March, inventor and idealist, decides to take up the challenge of the Sunday Times to make a non-stop, solo circumnavigation in a sailboat. A struggling entrepreneur, he figures that the race will garner attention for the unusual trimaran design he intends to use in the Reviews 607 competition. In spite of a number of obstacles—including the hasty construction of his racing vessel—Peter leaves his family with wildly high hopes of a victorious return. His ambitions are shattered when a number of early mishaps set him far behind his rivals. Well aware of the dire effects his loss in the race will have on family finances and his reputation, Peter devises plan B: that is, he will retrace his voyage back to England and invent an alternate ship’s log to represent falsely the circumnavigation he never made. As the story unfolds, it comes to light that Peter’s faulty reasoning is only one manifestation of an increasingly...