224 Reviews Le Realisme africain: le roman francophone en Afrique subsaharienne. By Claire L. Dehon. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2002. 412 pp. ?32. ISBN 2-7475-1843-4. As Europeans we must accept the difficultyof navigating between comparing the African novel to its Western canonical counterpart on the one hand, and negotiating the hermeticism of African culture on the other. Strangely, Claire Dehon's study of realism in the francophone African novel manages to avoid neither of these extremes. Continually harking back to Zola, Maupassant, Balzac, the study locks African writing in a Eurocentric straitjacket. But more important is the lack of debate about 'realism'. Are 'the real', 'realism', and 'reality' so easily interchangeable? There is a definition of 'la realite expressive' given here (p. 14) and a clear explanation, but the level of literary debate is low; there is no mention of magic realism, nor, until the very end, that of reading or interpretation. Dehon divides her analysis into five subgenres: birth, the quotidian, history,revolt, and new realism. Her analysis is fine,fair,straightforward, but is that the 'real'? Surely, a more comprehensive, total understanding of the 'real' as experienced in francophone Africa would require reader-response analysis and a thorough sociology of reading. There is a meagre reference to the former in the book's conclusion, but it is confused and ill thought-out: 'le realisme [as opposed to?] a paru et parait aujourd'hui encore comme le seul mode litteraire acceptable pour la plupart des lecteurs africains'; but also: 'les lecteurs africains acceptent une plus grande liberte dans ce qui est considere "vrai" que les Occidentaux' (p. 372). This is the crux of any analysis of African realism, in no way explored here. This leaves the African writer, for whom Dehon has some harsh words. 'Pour ebranler le systeme', she decrees, 'les critiques ne suffisentpas, il faut des heros qui le mettent en echec, point que quelques auteurs ont compris tels qu'Ake Loba, Jean-Pierre Makouta Mboukou, Aminata Sow Fall et Angele Rawiri', something which, unfortunately suggests Dehon, 'bien d'autres n'osent ou ne veulent pas incorporer dans leur fiction' (p. 370). This feels like an old, worn-out debate (if not too strong a word here), whose trajectory was 'sorted' by Stalin with respect to Trotsky and an ice pick in 1940. It is perhaps rather unfortunate forthose seeking social justice that you cannot tell novelists how to write. Surely the task of the critic is to establish what the reality that 'realism' represents might be, especially given the extensive research carried out here. But Dehon gives the game away in the occasional comment. Novels by Boubacar Boris Diop, Pius Ngandu Nkashama, may put 'en question le modele realiste', but they are reserved for 'une minorite, a cause de leur longueur et de leur difficulte(le lecteur ne peut pas toujours determiner ce qui se passe' (p. 372)). Nor do they have, Dehon assures us, 'le succes de livres plus brefs et simples'. I imagine Sony Labou Tansi turning in his grave. Leaving aside the Zhdanovian aspect, I wonder whether Africans suffering from IMF and World Bank policies know 'ce qui se passe', even get the chance to read novels which might 'explain' things clearly to them. Dehon sees the 'fantastic' form of writing (presumably in opposition to 'realism'), seemingly dominant in the African novel of recent years, as 'pessimistic'. Well yes, since the 1980s the African novel has been 'pessimistic', and quite rightly so. African writing is not stuck in the nineteenth century: it is being dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first. University of Leeds Andy Stafford Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. By Aime Cesaire. Trans. and ed. by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. With an Introduction by Andre Bre? ton. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. 2001. xx + 66pp. $15.95. ISBN 0-8195-6452-4. Given that the task of simply reading Cesaire's epic poem is formany a difficult(if rewarding ) one, that of translating the work well must be particularly painstaking. The MLRy ioo.i, 2005 225 careful translator will be forced to consult atlases, dictionaries of various languages? including Creole and several African languages...