CE Roman Research Articles

EasyJet by Alexandre Friederich

claire serpentant au milieu d’un marécage vénéneux”(119). Toutefois le lecteur jugera si l’apithérapie et les Accords de Dayton suffisent à assouvir les rancœurs tant que justice n’est pas servie par la vérité lénifiante des faits. Il était une fois la Yougoslavie. University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh Yvette A. Young Friederich, Alexandre. easyJet. Paris: Allia, 2014. ISBN 978-2-84485-778-6. Pp. 87. 6,20 a. Ostensibly written over a period of twenty days, during which Swiss blogger Friederich took seventeen different intercity flights on the low-cost carrier easyJet, this slim volume is not a simple chronicle of adventures in airports. It is about how an airline ’s marketing strategy, including the typical passenger’s experience, has both shaped and reflected the state of consumer society in Europe today. One gets the impression that easyJet“means”less than it reveals, and, in eighty-seven pages, it reveals plenty: for instance, a Europe mushrooming with regional airports, where people of all social classes now routinely travel thousands of kilometers for both business and pleasure. The ubiquity of orange easyJet airplanes signals the banality of air travel: it is everywhere , accessible to almost everyone. The people Friederich meets, usually because they are sitting next to him on flights, illustrate the ease of air travel for most Europeans . An anxious Greek man, signing himself during takeoff, returns to a job in Berlin (21); a young woman leaves Greece to find a job in Germany, which she knows nothing about (37). That flight, from Thessalonica to Dortmund, much like another Friederich takes from Lisbon to London, contains locals heading to less economically stressed cities to look for work (41). Other travelers are flying to visit their “second homes”— a phenomenon encouraged by low-cost airlines, according to Friederich—or simply to vacation in cities they have never seen before. More importantly, easyJet redefines air travel as a form of thoroughly industrialized behavior. Especially since the massive airport security reforms following the 9/11 attacks in the United States, travel has become both mechanized and humiliating. The passenger must now “répondre aux robots, respecter leurs instructions, éviter le rapport humain, être ponctuel, renoncer à ses affaires personnelles, se plier aux exigences, éviter les questions”(27).What seems even more a shame is that passengers are now willing to submit to this dehumanizing process, in exchange for the ease and low cost of traveling to other cities:“Désormais, le passager est là pour l’avion” (27). One of the first anecdotes in the book evokes the industrial nature of the process: two totally unrelated travelers, an African and a Northern European, wash their hands in an identical series of movements, in an airport bathroom: “L’avion et le lavabo sont des outils [...] le nettoyage du corps et le transport de l’homme des processus” (9). It may be the era of easyJet, but this could be a scene out of Jacques Tati’s satirical, stylized 1967 film, Playtime. Now, however, there are many more such scenes playing out in European airports. Ultimately, 254 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 255 Friederich seems less interested in contemporary consumer culture than in our evolution as a curious, moving species: the easyJet phenomenon unfolds in the era of the Internet, after all. This confluence conditions our sense of what it means to “go” to “other places.” For Friederich, this signals an imminent, post-human era in which air travel could become totally obsolete. University of Wisconsin, Madison Ritt Deitz Grainville, Patrick. Bison. Paris: Seuil, 2014. ISBN 978-2-02-113889-4. Pp. 318. 20 a. Ce roman, qui prend souvent des allures de récit historique, raconte le séjour en 1832 du peintre George Catlin chez les Sioux des plaines de l’Amérique du Nord. Quelques années auparavant, le cœur de Catlin avait bondi en voyant une délégation de dignitaires indiens visiter Philadelphie en grand appareil. Pris de passion, il renonce à sa carrière d’avocat et de peintre urbain et quitte sa vie confortable pour peindre sur le vif les Indiens dont il soupçonne le sort malheureux. Avec son guide et...

La mer à courir par Jean-Luc Marty

Reviews 275 qui se trouve pris entre État et islamistes, autrement dit entre la peste et le choléra, explique Adam. À la fin du véritable tour de force qu’est ce roman, le lecteur, malheureusement, demeure peu convaincu du succès du personnage. Il se trouve que le dernier des Sijilmassi échoue sur une plage, nu comme Adam, mais on se pose la question de savoir s’il lui reste suffisamment de conscience pour comprendre s’il a ou non réussi dans sa quête. Western Kentucky University Karin Egloff Marty, Jean-Luc. La mer à courir. Paris: Julliard, 2014. ISBN 978-2-260-02075-2. Pp. 260. 19 a. This novel puzzles the reader in its early chapters. We seem to be reading three different stories. The first is about a young couple on the Atlantic coast of France, Josse and Livia. They get into a boating accident in which the wife, who we learn later was pregnant, is killed. The second story involves Paul, a young Tahitian who has come to Paris to do university studies in geography. Paul lives in an apartment in a suburban HLM as the guest of Eddy, a young Frenchman whom we and Paul never see. During his brief stay in Tahiti, before the time of the novel, Eddy invited Paul to come to France to study. The third narrative concerns Virginie, a young woman who has a temporary job at a news information agency, which is also located in the suburbs of Paris. Virginie is obsessed with the history of Bolivia and the loss of its coastline in a war with Chile. She yearns for the return to Bolivia of the territory its neighbor stole from her.As the novel progresses, all these different threads are brought together. The unifying agent is the journal which once belonged to Paul’s stepfather Josse and which his mother Tokahi asked him to take to a certain person in France. It turns out that Josse, now dead, a physician in Tahiti, was the young man in the boating accident and that Virginie, who was safely delivered in spite of her mother’s death, is his long-lost daughter. Virginie was raised by her grandparents in France after Josse in his grief sought refuge like Gauguin in the faraway tropics of the South Pacific. Josse’s travel account is filled with emotional addresses to his late wife about the places he sees. Livia was originally from Bolivia, and this explains her daughter’s obsessive interest in that country’s fortunes. Paul and Virginie, destined by their emblematic names to come together, become slowly acquainted after he deposits her father’s diary at her place of work. They lay eyes on each other for the first time while each is walking along the river. Virginie is at first both attracted to and frightened by the athletic young Tahitian. In the course of time they become friends and, after much hesitation, lovers at the novel’s end. In addition to being a love story, Marty’s novel is a stark portrayal of life in the suburban housing developments of Paris. The people of color from France’s former colonies who live there survive in poverty and misery on the margins of French society. They are the victims both of the police, who harass them in the name of the established order, and the criminal elements among themselves. Theirs is a Dantean hell from which there appears to be no hope of escape. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Matthieussent, Brice. Luxuosa. Paris: P.O.L., 2015. ISBN 978-2- 8180-2178-1. Pp. 384. 18 a. As he boards the Luxuosa, Matthieussent’s namesake narrator is transformed into a crane, and this metamorphosis gives a fantastical twist to the invitation au voyage the writer offers us. From now on he is Lola, a Converse-wearing, Tati-bag-toting, Persolsunglass -wearing, Pelikan-smoking, common crane, who, as an outsider to the human species, is poised to analyze the peculiar entertainment experience promised by modern-day cruises. Toward this end, Lola has forsaken her aviary migratory habits and eschewed the scenic stops on the ship’s Mediterranean journey in...

Les barrages de sable par Jean-Yves Jouannais

Reviews 273 the reader in all this? Far from being a self-indulgent self-exploration, this récit highlights the importance of literature in our lives. It shows us with elegance and gentle humor how we construct stories to make sense out of chaos and how this helps us chart our course. Metropolitan State University of Denver Ann Williams Jouannais, Jean-Yves. Les barrages de sable. Paris: Grasset, 2014. ISBN 978-2-24685197 -4. Pp. 204. 17 a. A long meditation about building sand castles and their analogy to military defense, the narrative moves amoeba-like into various genres. It represents serious inquiry, using citations of writers from ancient, medieval to modern times. The book reads at times like a personal journal, at times like a treatise, and at times like a novel. The text begins like a novel in which a father is supervising the playtime of his two young children on a beach as they build a dam in the sand against the Atlantic. Explaining the movement of tides, his thoughts wander to ancient writers and to Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars. Later, when remembering this evening, he recalls telling his children the story of the King of Sparta during his siege of Mantinea. It was the proposal to block the flow of a river that caused flooding in this town and made its capture feasible.His children learned that they too were playing at subjugating the waters to meet their own ends. The childhood practice of making sandcastles is thus connected to the strategies of waging war. Connections are also made to writing and literature in an analogy between the activity of writing and the building of blockades. Concurring with Alfieri, the author believes that writing poetry is similar to the building of a barrage. While a barrage may let water pass through its tiny openings, a poem by its arrangement of blocks of words has spaces through which other voices are allowed to pass. Unique events that changed military outcomes are presented such as the defeat of the German forces at the Battle of Yser in Belgium during the Second World War. On the march toward Dunkirk, the Germans were able to push back the Allied forces. A simple lockkeeper, Hendrik Geeraert, proposed to open the floodgates of the dams and all the weirs. This maneuver surpassed all his expectations. The entire area was inundated and transformed into a lake. The Germans thus confounded, were forced to retreat. Sand structures can metaphorically serve as monuments to soldiers missing in action. One such case is that of Japanese soldier Hiro Onoda, charged to serve on the Philippine island of Lubang in 1944, during World War II. Onoda hid in the hills, faithfully defending his post until 1974. The Japanese government had to locate his original commander, Major Taniguchi, to order him to surrender. The text moves in and out of amazing ruminations: letters to Proust; the Song of Roland; the story of Alexander the Great, whose coat of arms showed a sand fortification facing the tide; the etymology of the word infantry; all flow one after another. The word infant links to foot-soldier taking us back to the earliest methods of war. Readers who enjoy military planning, strategies of defense, recondite and surprising facts, literary or historical reflections from diverse epochs and nations, will savor this book. It provides moments of wonder; one reading will not suffice to justly assimilate this composite of styles. Neumann University (PA) Maria G. Traub Laroui, Fouad. Les tribulations du dernier Sijilmassi. Paris: Julliard, 2014. ISBN 9782 -260-02141-4. Pp. 324. 20 a. Ce roman est un pur joyau dont il faut saluer la truculence de la première partie, car les choses se gâtent dans la seconde. Adam Sijilmassi, jeune ingénieur marocain, mène une vie très pleine, qu’il décide de changer radicalement pour se replonger dans sa culture. Le personnage est, pour son malheur, le fils d’une famille connue qui se retrouve pris dans les mailles d’un filet, entre l’État omniprésent et une non moins pesante secte islamiste dont il n’a que faire. Quoique souvent juste...

La mort de Laclos by Didier Laroque

Reviews 259 come. In addition, there are places in her novel far below the reading level of the layman . The author should rewrite and attempt at least two if not three separate works from this one. Alliance Française de Santa Rosa (CA) Davida Brautman Laroque, Didier. La mort de Laclos. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2014. ISBN 978-2-87673931 -4. Pp. 159. 15 a. By the early 1800s the intellectual and often libertine values of the Enlightenment were well on their way to being superseded by Romanticism’s exaltation of emotion, nature, and love. Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782) somewhat belatedly epitomizes the former, while Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), though published earlier, represents the latter and, in fact, was a major factor (along with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther) in creating the Romantic movement. Laroque’s very late entry into this field alludes to both of these French epistolary novels. Rousseau’s Saint-Preux and his beloved Julie are evoked by the names and feelings of Laroque’s protagonist and narrator, Benjamin Saint Trois de Becq, and the woman he loves, also named Julie; further, both couples’stories echo that of Abélard and Héloïse. Laclos himself represents the Enlightenment, appearing in person at the novel’s conclusion. The narration evokes eighteenth-century fiction, as do the diaries and letters, which flesh out the story; the vocabulary and style downplay exciting events while insisting on the power of love and the joys of the countryside. Saint Trois, a light-cavalry lieutenant, wants to leave the army of Napoleon to pursue a “destin contemplatif”(120), but he must overcome inertia and find enough money to live on. He is the sort of figure Joseph Campbell wrote about in The Hero with a Thousand Faces: his father is unknown, and he is sent on a dangerous journey. Helped by a series of mysterious guides, he undergoes a painful mutilation—though not, fortunately, Abélard’s—and at the end discovers his true self. At the start he gloomily “devine le monde parvenu à sa fin”(23),but at the end,“un souffle impétueux [l]’enthousiasm[e]” (158) as he starts his new life. On the literal level of the plot, while Saint Trois is stationed in Dijon in 1803, he is ordered to deliver a sealed letter to Laclos, who has recycled himself as an artillery general and is stationed near the toe of Italy’s boot, where he may be involved in a conspiracy to restore the power of the Pope over the Catholic church in France. Because the packet might contain the conspirators’ plans, Saint Trois is menaced by the anti-clerical faction, and he is also the victim of Julie’s brother, who resents his sister’s secret marriage to a man of lower birth. No supporter of the papacy and repulsed by libertinage,Saint Trois is exalted by German romanticism. In fact, he has already published a Traité de la grandeur in Berlin which, not coincidentally , has almost the same title as a previous book by his creator, Laroque, an architect by profession. This, Laroque’s first novel, is an ambitious attempt to write history and philosophy in the form of fiction. If it is not entirely successful as a novel, it is provocative and engaging. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Leclair, Bertrand. Le vertige danois de Paul Gauguin. Arles: Actes Sud, 2014. ISBN 978-2-330-02775-9. Pp. 182. 19 a. En novembre 1885, à l’âge de 36 ans, Gauguin quitte la France pour rejoindre sa femme et ses cinq enfants à Copenhague, où il restera jusqu’en juin 1886. Que s’est-il passé pendant ce court séjour nordique, peu traité par les biographes de l’artiste? C’est ce que Leclair explore dans ce roman tout à la fois biographie, étude psychologique et essai sur l’art. Leclair présente cette époque comme un tournant dans la vie d’un homme tiraillé entre son devoir familial et son désir—voire son besoin—de peindre. Ce n’est que depuis peu que Gauguin a abandonné son travail de courtier en bourse...

Paris est un rêve érotique by Thibault Malfoy

tolerance, won the 2014 Prix Pierre Guénin, created in 2009 to recognize the efforts of those who fight against homophobia and for the recognition of LGBT rights. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Malfoy, Thibault. Paris est un rêve érotique. Paris: Grasset, 2014. ISBN 978-2-24680893 -0. Pp. 206. 17 a. In a promotional video produced by Librairie Mollat, Malfoy says of his first novel: “Je crois qu’on peut dire que tout est dans le titre.” This is true; the novel’s scope does not extend much beyond that. After a promising, but all-too-brief opening gambit— a semi-hallucinogenic description of a cabaret dancer just before she enters the stage, initially written in the second person—the novel quickly slides into what has become a trope of contemporary French fiction: a first-person, present-tense tale of a twentyor thirty-something, a cultured bobo meandering through Paris in search of meaning . In this case, our unnamed narrator, who has recently resigned from his position at the“Fondation,”is well known for his truffle risotto, has a shoe obsession, and prepares dance mixes on his phone for parties. He details the “cartographie fétichiste de [ses] errances nocturnes” (31) primarily near Ledru-Rollin, hitting hotspots familiar to those who know the area (Pause café, Le China, Le Motel, Morry’s) where he imbibes a variety of cocktails with exotic names. Zoé, the narrator’s girlfriend who works as an editorial assistant, which allows us a foray into the 6e arrondissement for a business luncheon, invites him to a cabaret as a birthday gift. It is here that the narrator lays eyes upon Cecilia, the aforementioned dancer and Zoé’s friend. He is immediately smitten. Cecilia “se livre sans pudeur, et son sans-gêne me gêne” (59). Her presence completely upends his life. Obsessed by her body he begins to see her everywhere, on every street corner: “Et je te vois; ou plutôt, je vois une femme répétée à l’infini. Elle découpe mes nuits en rêveries érotiques” (44). And there is a dreamlike quality to the novel. Besides the narrator’s regular visits to Dr. Catherine Maldore, an “onirologue” who pays him to recount his dreams, he also calls on an apothicaire in the 10e who offers him a “poudre magique [...] la Neige bleue” (101–02), which he uses on several occasions. The reader is at times unsure as to which parts of the narrator’s clandestine meetings with Cecilia are real and what is imagined. Finally, the novel is spiced with moments of eroticism, including a tryst on a péniche during a snowstorm, quotations from Philosophie dans le boudoir recited in an effort to invigorate the narrator, and the possibility of a threesome between the main characters at Zoé’s behest. Yet, like much of the novel, one is left cold. While the author appears to be exploring the juxtaposition between exhibitionism and voyeurism, between the oneiric and the conscious while simultaneously celebrating a city that has inspired countless writers, the novel mainly comes across as shallow and clichéd. Near the end of the work the 262 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 263 narrator exclaims:“Ah, j’en ai marre: les évasions, les courses-poursuites, ça va bien un temps, j’ai envie d’arrêter, de prendre ma retraite” (203). This is also true. Bradley University (IL) Alexander Hertich Masson, Jean-Yves. L’incendie du théâtre de Weimar. Paris: Verdier, 2014. ISBN 9782 -86432-746-2. Pp. 192. 15 a. Un épisode peu connu, raconté par Eckermann dans ses Conversations avec Goethe (1836), constitue le point de départ de ce roman. Dans la nuit du 21 au 22 mars 1825, un incendie détruisit le théâtre de la Cour grand-ducale de Weimar, que Goethe avait dirigé de 1791 à 1817. Le roman de Masson présente cet incendie comme la fin d’une époque particulièrement glorieuse dans la longue carrière littéraire de Goethe et comme la préfiguration de la mort de l’écrivain en 1832 (également un 22 mars). Pour représenter Eckermann, et à travers lui l...

Un homme effacé by Alexandre Postel

seven years earlier. The novel, a first-person narration, tells the story of French filmmaker Hortense, raised in Caen. She describes her hometown as “ma ville de province étriquée” (17). She details her relationship with her “trop aimante” (20) mother who understands Hortense well, and indulges her whims. Her father, seen as bigoted and“sévère”(17) is, in fact, protective: Hortense suffers from bipolar disorder which can be managed with a medication that causes weight gain.When the protagonist does not take her medication regularly, however, she experiences periods of manic activity followed by depression. She dreams often of escaping from her bourgeoise life. On impulse, she buys a round-trip ticket to Ouagadougou for the purpose of attending a film festival, to her mother’s delight. On the other hand, her father complains that she might “nous ramener un autre Nègre” (17); this is his way of expressing concern, as Hortense has been recovering from a romantic break-up with a black African living in Caen. In Ouagadougou, the protagonist meets film producer Seydou, a love-atfirst -sight encounter for them both. When Seydou proposes marriage after only a few days, Hortense assents, not knowing that a pregnant first wife awaits Seydou in Dakar. Although shocked that Seydou is already married, Hortense converts to Islam immediately and learns the details of being the second wife, particularly which nights of the week she can spend with Seydou. Overcome with passion for him, she fails to understand that her arrival has disrupted his family.Awa, the first wife, exhibits hatred towards Hortense; as the first wife, she had hoped to have Seydou’s undivided attention before and after the birth of their first child. The protagonist, who speaks of having a child with Seydou herself, has interfered with Awa’s plans. At the end of a mere two months of marriage, Hortense decides to return to France because she has had enough of “riz-au-poisson [...], Seydou comme unique interlocuteur [...] et d’être devenue le petit robinet blanc à Céfa”(250).Hortense’s account of her short time as the“deuxième femme” interests the reader by virtue of her being part of such a culturally diverse couple. An African man having a white European second wife is virtually unknown. In addition,Deuxième femme informs us about women’s interactions in this polygamous setting. To its disadvantage, the novel only narrowly characterizes the protagonist’s reactions to second wifehood, since her feelings express the extremes of joy and tears, mostly the latter. Her psychological vulnerability conjures sympathy in the reader as it simultaneously raises the question of how to help mentally-ill adults who are noncompliant with their medical treatments. University of Texas, El Paso Jane E. Evans Postel, Alexandre. Un homme effacé. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07013850 -0. Pp. 243. 17,90 a. Tout en étant situé dans le hic et nunc du monde moderne, ce roman offre des réflexions sur des sujets aussi immémoriaux que la vérité et les apparences, le 218 FRENCH REVIEW 87.3 Reviews 219 déterminisme social ou encore la souillure. Damien North, professeur de philosophie dans une université qui pourrait être américaine, homme réservé, solitaire et introverti, veuf depuis douze ans et à peine sexué, se voit accuser d’avoir téléchargé des images pédopornographiques, crime qu’il n’a pas commis. La machine sociale et juridique— journalistes, témoins divers, procureur et expert psychiatre—se met en marche et North, qui a plaidé coupable sur conseil de son avocat, est condamné à la prison. Il sera finalement innocenté mais, et c’est là un des questionnements du roman, là où Postel va plus loin qu’Hitchcock avec ses héros faussement accusés: peut-on jamais être blanchi? Car, comme “[e]ntre le faux et le vrai, il y a un espace qui est celui de l’apparence du vrai” (27), il existe une différence entre être innocenté et être innocent. Cette épreuve poursuivra North et dans la perception qu’ont de lui les autres (ses voisins dont les soupçons sont réveillés à la fin) et dans sa...

Biblical quotations in Faustus’s Capitula

Scholars are still of the opinion that Augustine first started to read and discuss the Bible only once he became a Catholic Christian, or even only after his appointment as a Catholic priest. The possibility of Manichaean influences on Augustine’s reproduction of biblical texts is therefore, in many cases, not taken into account. However, the study of (Latin) Manichaean sources gives us reason to rethink that position. This article is an investigation of the use of Scripture in the most extensive, still existing Manichaean work, originally written in Latin, namely the Capitula. Its author was the Manichaean bishop Faustus (flor. app. 380 CE Roman Africa). The most important subject in the Capitula concerns those parts of Scripture that bear relevance to the real Christian. Therefore, the work provides important insight into the Manichaeans’ use and appreciation of Scripture. Faustus was well-known to the young Augustine and as a consequence the Capitula could well give us important insights into Augustine’s knowledge of and opinions on Scripture as a Manichaean hearer. One problem with this theory is the fact that Augustine only received the work some 13 years after his conversion to Catholic Christianity. However, the examination of the quotations from Scripture, that have as its focus those from the Old Testament, illustrates, amongst others, that Faustus mainly used Biblical texts already quoted in the works of Addas/Adimantus (flor. 270 CE). The Capitula turns out to be an eloquent recycling of earlier Manichaean biblical arguments – a fact that makes it very likely that the content of the Capitula was known to Augustine in his Manichaean years. As a consequence, one should reckon with Manichaean influence on Augustine’s reproduction of biblical texts.

Augustine’s view of Manichaean almsgiving and almsgiving by the Manichaean community at Kellis

Taking its point of departure from Augustine’s criticism of Manichaean practices with food and drink that appear to disregard the New Testament injunction to give to the poor, or to those who are hungry and thirsty, this article investigates the probability that this was indeed Manichaean practice, by interrogating Manichaean texts and clues about Manichaean practice contained in the personal letters from 4th century CE Roman Kellis in Egypt. A further consideration of types of exclusive communities and their behaviour, or exclusive behaviour at various times from groups that are generally characterised as inclusive, leads to the proposal that Manichaean exclusivity was based firmly on an underlying theology and narrative myth of cosmic salvation that fixed an unalterable Manichaean community practice, carried out in a wide range of geographical locations and historical times.

Intimité et autres objets fragiles by Marie-Ève Sévigny

intriguing method for storytelling and for detective work. There is no linear progression of the plot. Rather the reader moves along as if looking over Clovis’s shoulder at photos, documentary films, and other apparent evidence to piece together the past. There is talent in Renonçay’s writing style. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne SÉVIGNY, MARIE-ÈVE. Intimité et autres objets fragiles. Montréal: Triptyque, 2012. ISBN 978-2-89031-744-4. Pp. 100. $18 Can. Sévigny’s Intimité may be slight in size, but its short stories are not without a certain moral weight. As the publisher’s insert announces, the stories explore “la frontière entre la vie privée et la vie publique des êtres que nous côtoyons,” that is, not full-frontal intimacy, but that borderland where we risk going too far into some other human being’s private territory or, quite the opposite, where we do not venture far enough. One of the compelling qualities of the collection is the variety of ways in which Sévigny renders the concept of human intimacy. Readers would rightly assume that the author might feature love stories, though only one of them comes close to suggesting erotic passion. “Une carte à la clé” follows a lover’s indiscreet reading of a postcard that evokes an earlier romantic interlude in his partner’s life. His identification with “Alter,” the name he assigns to his unknown rival, leads him to imagine a relationship that is perhaps nothing more than the mirror image of his own. “Intimité” takes an opposite tack, with a protagonist who jealously protects her privacy by renting off-season cottages in frigid and isolated surroundings. Her frankly uncordial behavior toward a neighbor she imagines to be interfering (“avoir des principes, c’est rarement avoir du plaisir” [32]) turns out to be inappropriate, as the neighbor’s well-meaning overtures were intended for the cottage owner alone. Sauvage though she may be about her own privacy, the protagonist finds herself drawn to the unspoken and untraceable connection between two other people. In yet another of these stories, “Tout sucre, tout beurre,” a man returned to bachelorhood goes to comic lengths to protect his personal life from the meddlesome habits of his co-workers, who enjoy hawking the private lives of anyone and everyone on the open market of office gossip. More touchingly rendered are the tales of individuals (a paraplegic EMT, a schizophrenic, a homeless person, an aging nursing home resident) for whom an intimate life, let alone a cherished and protected identity, is unimaginable from the outside—though the author explores just such possibilities. Sévigny constructs her nouvelles with a subtlety that privileges tone and detail rather than plot. Some of the stories give voice to the renowned québécois humor, for example, when a character remarks: “Une mouche, oui, une mouche me réveille, exultant d’avoir été dégelée” (30). Other stories are marked with a stronger brand of irony: “Les gens se moquent de la vie des autres. Tout ce qui les intéresse, c’est de valider la leur par contraste” (42). But Sévigny’s tone does not get any harsher than that; all of the tales seem to support the title’s suggestion that intimacy is not to be roughly handled. Reading this collection brought to mind positive comparisons with the grande dame of short story writing, Annie Saumont. Very much like her, Sévigny crafts her stories with controlled efficiency that nevertheless does not diminish the impact of her mostly unanticipated endings. Sévigny also has come close to perfecting the art of voice—appropriately so given the theme of the 1302 FRENCH REVIEW 86.6 collection—although she does not have the same range of register as Saumont. Colleagues in search of short works for the classroom should find Intimité’s stories accessible but thought-provoking. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March STHERS, AMANDA. Rompre le charme. Paris: Stock, 2012. ISBN 978-2-234-07168-1. Pp. 144. 16,50 a. Ce roman d’inspiration autobiographique, écrit à la première personne, est émotionnellement dur, parfois violent. Amanda, la narratrice, est écrivain et...

Dernier état des lieux by Pierre-Alain Tâche

TÂCHE, PIERRE-ALAIN. Dernier état des lieux. Chavannes-près-Renens: Empreintes, 2011. ISBN 978-2-940414-15-4. Pp. 113. 19,20 a. This third poetry collection in a series by Tâche shares modest explorations of place, many of which take on a haunting, elevating quality thanks to the calm voice of experience that characterizes the wandering self and the mostly balanced— at times exquisite—prosody that orients the reader. In the manner of L’état des lieux and Nouvel état des lieux, the poems’ appeal lies in Tâche’s receptivity and the literary voice that enables us to inhabit widely ranging scenes in north and southeastern France, Malta, Romania, Normandy, Switzerland’s Upper Engadine, and Paris. Aiming to grasp the real “dans sa profusion, dans son chatoiement” (back cover), the author resists foregrounding any one particular effect his surroundings might have on him and focuses instead on gracefully bearing witness to the passing of days, albeit with hints of elegy and regret at not ensuring attunement to “la beauté” (51, 75, 78, 97). An affirming, inquisitive urge makes itself felt structurally, through titled poems of about three to five elegantly measured stanzas that home in on specific settings, events, and emotions. Successive pages introduce tableaux whose words and sounds add light and shade to the pursuit of personal, local, historical, and spiritual knowledge. The opening poem, “Naviguer,” sets the tone for the volume ’s alertness to intense micro-environments that are then artisanally reconstructed through diction, consonance, and intermittent rhyme: in this pastoral scene, the speaker discovers a temporary ability to “naviguer sans bruit / dans la profonde nasse de verdure, / où dort le fin mot d’un secret,” within the purified atmosphere of “les cathédrales de sève, / où chants et vols ont convolé” (11). Unafraid to “lire avidement dans le fugace” (29), to suggest for instance the endless promise of a similar “présence rayonnante” offered to us “dans la paume des monts, / surpassant la respiration des forêts” (78), Tâche by no means contents himself with facile optimism. The diverse backdrops, in addition to subtle differences in line lengths, establish in compact form undercurrents of uncertainty and unpredictability that could be said to validate the search for meaning. “Avant Scey” portrays a car’s mad, fiery dash on land as contrasted with diligent, always renewed work on a ship (17); “Éléphants nains” emphasizes “le devenir foireux de l’espèce” (25); “Un rideau vénitien” depicts a museum object that has become “retranché du naos, / incomplet, vacant, désœuvré” (51); and several section endings convey the potential emptiness of the impulse to “ruer / dans le cadre obligé du poème” (106). Absorbing human portraits include a young girl pronouncing “gravement kau / (comme cause ou caution)” for “co-que-li-cots” (38); a provincial “cour, où les marchands des quatre vents / disputent tout le jour de petits riens” (53); and a street musician at the Louvre whose flute “incite [...] à la badinerie” while “[l]es gens, les marronniers, le ciel / tout bourgeonne et jubile” (84). The palpable ache can in some poems seem overly sonorous or elliptically expressed. Nonetheless, the overall coherence and conviction make for moments of stunning clarity and a movement toward collective wisdom: “La paix qui règne ici tient sa fraîcheur / d’une source profonde; et nous, / qui profanons la pulpe de l’énigme, / en pèlerins futiles, nous l’aimons” (45). With a master’s touch for subdued lyricism, Tâche extends a distinctly Swiss tradition—though one well informed by the broader poetic canon—of immersion in landscapes of all sorts. He echoes Ramuz and others in his gravitation around an observed center and attention to concrete details surfacing as part of a ceaseless “retour de l’élémen1006 FRENCH REVIEW 86.5 taire” (103). These are perceptive, evocative accounts of circulation in the outer world, as well as of the immediacy such encounters can achieve in sensitively modulated frameworks. Southwestern University (TX) Aaron Prevots ZALBERG, CAROLE. À défaut d’Amérique. Arles: Actes Sud, 2012. ISBN 978-2-330-002466 . Pp. 214. 18,50 a. Ce roman clôt la trilogie de Zalberg...

Rue des voleurs by Mathias Énard

Reviews 271 like Le Palace, Mother Earth’s, and the Centre Pompidou. For readers of a certain age fortunate to have lived in Paris between 1968 and 1980, À nous deux, Paris! commemorates a nocturnal City of Lights that captivated and disappointed its adoring young inhabitants, both native and foreign. Jérôme endears himself to the reader through his bravado and naiveté. He believes that a well-established musician will ‘discover’ him for what he really is: a pianist with unequalled talents, even though he is only mediocre. He therefore commits himself to frequenting night clubs in the hopes of encountering his future benefactor.The jobs that he lands,however,are far from ideal: for instance, he works as a secretary-accompanist for Mina, an aging, temperamental rock singer struggling to keep her career afloat, and he provides the background music for two Cuban brothers cutting their enormously successful first record, but receives no royalties. Nevertheless, Jérôme is elated for having found work in “le monde du spectacle” (71), his chosen future milieu; and although unpaid for his piano accompaniment to the record, he henceforth considers himself “un musicien professionnel” (220). As much as one admires Jérôme’s optimism, one becomes equally frustrated over his excessive trust in musicians who exploit his availability and good nature. Besides his overblown self-confidence and trust, Jérôme faces the typical concerns of a young person in charge of his own budget for the first time. His strives to stretch a limited income to cover necessities: stylish clothing, food, cigarettes, alcohol, and later on, drugs. The reader now wonders if Jérôme will be able to control his substance abuse, as his circle of friends relies heavily on chemical stimulation. This first indication of Jérôme’s physical vulnerability while “finding himself” occurs at about the midpoint of the story. Subsequently, the theme of possible danger for the protagonist continues to the end of the novel. Instead of providing the reader with a definite conclusion to his bildungsroman, however, Benoît Duteurtre gives one a choice of endings in two épilogues: one culminates in Jérôme’s untimely death, whereas the second offers a developmental view of the main character’s future. In a third épilogue, the author says that the protagonist “[lui] ressemble comme un frère” (324). At this point the reader fully understands that Duteurtre lived many of Jérôme’s experiences and that his love for the French capital motivated his coming to writing. Not only did his respect for Paris inspire him to convey historical and current events from 1980 accurately, it impelled him to include chronological information on the French capital as a center for aspiring musicians as well. University of Texas, El Paso Jane E. Evans Énard, Mathias. Rue des voleurs. Arles: Actes Sud, 2012. ISBN 978-2-330-01267-0. Pp. 256. 21,50 a. Ce roman raconte les tribulations d’un jeune Marocain de dix-sept ans, qui rêve d’aller de l’autre côté de la mer pour tenter sa chance en Europe. Il se compose de trois parties de longueur inégale—Détroits, Barzakh et la Rue des voleurs. Le héros, Lakhdar, mène une vie tranquille entre la cousine Meriem qui hante ses phantasmes, et les belles touristes européennes qu’il dévore des yeux. Le texte commence ainsi:“Les hommes sont des chiens, ils se frottent les uns aux autres dans la misère, ils se roulent dans la crasse sans pouvoir en sortir, se lèchent le poil et le sexe” (11). Comme les chiens sans colliers, Lakhdar erre dans sa ville, tente de noyer son oisiveté et ses frustrations sexuelles dans la lecture de polars. Tout va basculer pour lui le jour où son père le trouve en train de goûter aux fleurs du mal avec Meriem. Pour laver l’honneur de ce péché mortel, le père chasse son fils de la maison et le force à errer dans les rues. La narration alternera entre le printemps de Tunisie, les révoltes arabes et les Indignés d’Espagne. Au bord...

Rue Darwin by Boualem Sansal

seriousness of learning with his whining need to go to the bathroom. Those of us in education have dealt with our own “Tonios.” However, Resch, teacher of French, history, geography and civics, is able to communicate on the level of his students. He takes passages from classics such as Racine’s Andromaque or Rostand’s Cyrano and bends the alexandrines into modern-day rap such that the Tonios, Nadirs, and others can relate better. The author presents a typical anecdote of the classroom for each month and often uses a colloquial language. Resch not only intends to record what occurs in the classroom, but he genuinely wants to prepare his “kids” for the future: “Je me sens plus radio-réveil que prof” (31). During an incident involving disarming a student with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, he wishes the school would hire a “frappe-qu’un coup” (42), a person who strikes first and asks questions later! He writes with tongue-in-cheek humor, because which instructor among us has not prayed for the earth to open and swallow up the class clown or the recalcitrant provoker of incidents? Ironically the hired security guard does not last a week: “Toujours est-il qu’il s’est fait dévorer en une semaine. Taillé en pièces en quelques jours” (46). From discussions on the soccer teams PSG versus OM, to the revelation of a catastrophic afternoon in Porquerolles where Dominique’s class of boys destroys a Charlotte Gainsbourg film set while riding their bikes, the reader senses that the author is deeply connected to his class and transforms every activity into a learning adventure. Nevertheless, Dominique seems to disagree with technological progress: “Éteignons les ordinateurs. Les supports en papier me manquent. Tout comme la craie qui crie sur le tableau noir. Mon tableau blanc et mes feutres Velleda puent le sale progrès inutile. Beurk, beurk, beurk. Je n’ai pas envie d’envoyer des messages à mes élèves sur Facebook, j’ai envie de leur parler.” (69) As the year evolves, so do the anecdotes: the new teacher whose gaffe sets both students and staff laughing; the aromas of “soumassas” and “loukoums” offered by his students at the end of Ramadan, and one of the reasons that keeps Dominique at his job and not asking for a transfer; the class’s excursion to Antibes; the internship he visits where the electrical work done by the student enhances a porn show; the “mamamouchi” scene in a production of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme where the students question the mocking of the Muslim faith, and so much more. In choosing for his students the Pagnol trilogy (Marius, Fanny, César), Resch shows the intelligence and thoughtfulness of a great educator. If the reader wants to be inspired about teaching this “récit” is a must. When we teach, we often forget the classroom contains real bodies with individual problems, backgrounds , and points of view. We need to be there as advisor, friend, and listener. Resch shows his capacity to excel in all three categories. Santa Rosa Alliance Française (CA) Davida Brautman SANSAL, BOUALEM. Rue Darwin. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-07-013460-1. Pp. 455. 17.50 a. Ce roman raconte l’histoire de Yazid, dit Yaz, un petit enfant qui ne connait pas son père, et qui a été élevé par une série de femmes, notamment sa grandm ère Djéda, dans une Algérie des années cinquante où les hommes sont des rois déchus. Djéda, alias mamie, est la chef d’une tribu, devenue maquerelle malgré 798 FRENCH REVIEW 86.4 elle. Elle habitait dans une belle maison à Bordj-Dakir, à 300 kilomètres de la capitale, où elle tenait “la grande maison”, un bordel notoire où les dignitaires locaux, Français et Arabes, allaient effeuiller les fleurs du mal. Dans cet univers de boxons, on respecte la loi du silence, du mensonge établi en axiome, des histoires fabriquées pour cacher les vérités amères. On ne parle pas beaucoup et surtout pas de certaines choses innommables: l’omerta règne sur l’honneur de la tribu! Yaz...

Troisième humanité by Bernard Werber

be a long time in coming. In the long soliloquy that constitutes this novel, the narrator alternates between speaking to “tu” directly about their present situation and telling her personal story. We do not know if he is listening to her, but we certainly are, and with growing curiosity. While the device feels somewhat forced, the flow of information is not devoid of verisimilitude. We learn that our narrator is a wife, a mother, and a film journalist with a long series of movie star interviews to her credit. The offhand manner in which she talks of her family and her job makes it clear that, in fact, her life is of absolutely no interest to her (which, ironically, makes it more interesting to us). And then a certain someone spills a Diet Coke on her sweater, apologizes and the die is cast:“Le mal n’avait plus qu’à incuber”(60). Her obsession begins like a bolt of lightning. It develops over time, and she recounts its evolution within her, again interspersed with flashes of the present situation.And it is thus that we come to understand ; the“tu”is a not-so-handsome movie actor being held captive by our outwardly rational journalist.A few innocuous encounters between the two of them have sufficed to break the pattern of her universe where, as she puts it: “J’ai commencé à vivre à l’infinitif, un temps mort vivant. Vider la poubelle. Étendre le linge. Trouver le livre. Voir le film. Faire l’interview. Sourire. Parler. Faire rire” (75). One day, after an interview , he hugs her, innocently enough, but it pushes the obsession along.After another encounter, again professional, he suggests that she call him to go out for coffee and gives her his number. She calls; he does not call back:“En ne partageant pas ce café avec moi, tu ne m’as pas déçue. Tu m’as trahie. Et c’est pour cela que tu es ici” (146). The rest of the novel is made up of the kidnapping, the captivity, and eventual release of the poor unsuspecting actor, all of which underline the narrator’s insanity. Madness is difficult to portray but the obsessed woman in Brioche makes perfect sense. How could she be anything but what she is? This is the mark of successful character development , if not necessarily the guarantee of an excellent novel. Metropolitan State University of Denver (CO) Ann Williams Werber, Bernard. Troisième humanité. Paris: Albin Michel, 2012. ISBN 978-222624422 -2. Pp. 587. 22,90 a. Werber’s first trilogy, Les fourmis, put him on the literary map twenty years ago. In Troisième humanité, he reconnects with the Wells family, in this first part of an equally ambitious multi-part saga,taking place in relative time: ”Elle se passe précisément dix ans, jour pour jour, après l’instant où vous (le lecteur) ouvrirez ce roman et commencerez à le lire” (avertissement). This time, however, he blends the past, present, and potential future in a roller coaster ride of urgency.Gone“homo gigantis”discovered in the opening by Charles Wells, Edmond’s descendant, “homo sapiens” is about to follow suit as David Wells, his colleague Aurore and his scientific team race against time to create“homo metamorphosis,”a mini-human population, the third humanity, 286 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 287 more feminized, resistant, and unified, to combat extremism, and to stop harm to the earth. Each time the earth feels threatened—it is a living, breathing, verbal entity in this novel—whether being “drained” of its oil or incessantly overpopulated—the earth in turn strikes back with plague, tornadoes, or nuclear reactor meltdowns, just to name a few. Werber tries to create a delicate balance between the earth and its inhabitants, making use of “L’Encyclopédie du Savoir Relatif et Absolu”that he so successfully used in Les fourmis, and giving voice to a planet exhausted by man’s tendency towards violence, waste, and ruin. How original to“hear”the earth complain about drilling its surface, to wonder how it will combat the meteor bits hurling at it, to sense its loneliness vis-à-vis the lack of...

Comme un film des frères Coen par Bertrand Gervais

C’est là [...] que s’était libérée la faveur joyeuse d’un monde nouveau. C’est là aussi que s’était opéré le miracle de la simplification, quand l’idéologie prend forme et se radicalise afin de balayer les derniers sceptiques et ceux dont la conscience n’est pas encore tout à fait obscurcie par la haine. (133) Reflet de l’auteur, Louyre préfère la métaphysique aux “intrigues policières” (75) et il accepte le doute plutôt que de “se priver de la vérité” (76). En créant ce roman où les personnages incarnent les conflits d’une guerre chargée de passions idéologiques et où l’on en cache les crimes, Dugain nous engage dans la lecture d’un livre captivant où la poésie côtoie l’horreur. Spence School (NY) Mary P. Schmid Combal GERVAIS, BERTRAND. Comme un film des frères Coen. Montréal: XYZ, 2010. ISBN 978-289261 -590-6. 213p. $24 Can. Imagine a story about a male, middle-aged writer narrating in the first person . Imagine him without a marriage problem, a rival, a shrinking public, worries about his masculinity, or an obsession with his craft. Gervais has not written that novel. His latest book is a fairly standard plunge into the middle-aged-malewriter subgenre. Rémy Potvin is a fifty-year-old writer whose books no longer sell. His marriage is on the rocks, and his successful painter son has chosen Rémy’s literary rival as a father figure. As one might expect, Rémy narrates the story, is troubled by his sexual decline, and drinks too much. These traits make a brand-new book feel shopworn. So do a few other particularities. Take, for instance , the requisite Rival. We learn about him when Rémy’s son, Alexandre (suddenly famous as a painter of urban skateboarders), moves out of the family home after his mother, Carole, has left Rémy. When, over the phone, Rémy asks Alexandre who he is staying with, his son responds: “Tu ne veux pas le savoir” (123). The reader has already learned about the recent success of Victor Tracas, Rémy’s college pal who is now a popular writer (because, of course, he has sold out). Rémy’s penis-obsessed editor and drinking buddy Hubert has shared the news. We are not surprised when Victor drops in on Rémy then asks for some of Alexandre’s things in a suitcase—Rémy learns that Victor is Alexandre’s landlord and, possibly, his mentor. Victor is not the only character in the book, or even the main one. Yet, like many of the other characters, he helps us imagine what we are to believe a writer’s midlife crisis feels like. Rémy sniffs at Victor’s artificiality, bemoaning his rival’s proclivity for facile Internet-gleaned quotes—when, with his degree in philosophy, he should know better. At the same time, Rémy is frustrated when Victor spoils the film they are watching, telling Rémy: “Souviens-toi de ce qu’on a appris dans nos cours de cinéma. Écouter un film, ce n’est pas suivre une histoire , c’est contempler une œuvre” (134). Is Gervais mocking the intellectual who has gone commercial, or the didactic pedantry of intellectuals who hold their peers to clichéd standards for how one should behold a work of art? Scenes like this one seem too slapdash for the ideas they appear to be trying to develop. Yet even the most predictable passages contain regular flashes of the striking creativity one associates with Gervais’s other books. For instance, the father-son relationship 786 FRENCH REVIEW 85.4 runs deeper than one initially expects, calling up the expected Greek allusions (Daedalus, Oedipus) with aplomb. There is also unexpected tenderness many fathers will recognize, when Rémy—otherwise jealous of his own son—reads a note from Alexandre and is moved: “Peut-on désavouer un enfant qui nous appelle papa?” (147). The best part of this novel, though, is neither its narrator nor any of his family members. It is “Gwyneth,” an imaginary...

Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast by Jay M. Smith

SMITH, JAY M. Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-674-04716-7. Pp 378. $35. All those interested in the Seven Years War and the Enlightenment will find in Smith’s book a well-written and thoroughly-researched analysis of late eighteenthcentury France. But more than a political, cultural, and intellectual history, the revelations of the “making of a beast” are a riveting set of answers to questions about the nature of “the beast of Gévaudan” and its mythic status. Moreover, as fascinating and mysterious as the exploits of the beast were, Smith approaches the story in a novel way: he analyzes the environment that conditioned human reactions to reports of the sixty victims who died grisly deaths. In so doing, Smith reveals the “attitudes, assumptions, motives, and frustrations of the humans who struggled to understand and defeat the lethal enemy in their midst” (3). The title and subtitle warrant comment. While Smith admits in his intriguing introduction that the singular form of “the beast” is necessarily misleading, the author details the historical characters and events responsible for creating the monsters to which the legendary creature gave form. In the chapters that follow, Smith succeeds in explaining the survival of the powerful legend for over two hundred years. In one chapter, Smith paints the sense of curiosity and adventure that characterized thought during the Enlightenment. He describes the fascination for hybridity and the boundaries of species and asserts that naturalists’ open-ended research fueled public fascination for the exotic and strange beings of all kinds. Further, Smith delves into the animosities that agitated relationships between Catholics and Huguenots and the battle between Jansenists and Jesuits. Thus he provides the spiritually charged backdrop against which the events unfolded. He argues convincingly that the cultural, intellectual, and religious milieu prevailing in France created fertile ground for the myth to flourish. In another, equally absorbing chapter, Smith depicts in an impressive amount of detail the characters who contributed to the myth: a newspaper editor and a captain in the French army. The former reacted to the journalistic opportunities presented by gruesome reports of killings by an unknown beast in a hiatus in news events following the end of the Seven Years War and who “freely tested the limits of credibility” (72). The latter attempted to compensate for injured pride after fighting on the losing side against the Prussians and similarly “allowed imagination to run free” (85) in efforts to fill out the profile of his enemy. In the next three chapters, Smith explores the different ways in which the publicity surrounding the beast’s rampage defined its essence. Fortunately for the reader, these chapters are punctuated with ten black and white reproductions of enthralling prints that represent the fantastic beast; the text is less compelling. In particular, too many words are devoted to the d’Ennevals, a father-and-son team who unsuccessfully tried to destroy the beast. Chapter 7 chronicles “a transformation meeting site where great expectations openly collided with reality” (207): a larger than typical male wolf was shot and killed. The victory over the animal eventually marked the end of immediate interest in the story, but not before the allegedly fantastic character of the creature was further corroborated. “Yet the beast lived” (209) and there were further ravages. In chapter 8 Smith deconstructs the varying responses to the renewal of violence and two competing understandings of the events. As a result of one, the “illuminating historical context came to be forgotten or suppressed” (268), and as a result of the other, the narrative was completely decontextualized. In this book, Reviews 973 Smith effectively recontextualizes the beast of Gévaudan and convinces his readers that the monster was a product of its time. Texas A&M University-Kingsville Jacqueline Thomas Creative Works edited by Nathalie Degroult ANGOT, CHRISTINE. Les petits. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-0812-5364-3. Pp. 188. 17 a. Avec ce roman centré autour d’une figure masculine, l’auteure, qui d’ordinaire se met en scène dans des épisodes intimes où fiction et vécu s’entremêlent, compose un ouvrage dont elle est...

Je te verrai dans mes rêves by Alain Gerber

Argentina by a right-wing coup. Later his infant daughter drowned due to a moment of distraction on the part of his wife, Mélina. She in turn falls victim to an accident that leaves her for weeks in a vegetative state until she finally dies. While his wife lies comatose, Nestor is befriended by a doctor, Alice, who finds in the man’s suffering and withdrawal from life an echo of her own emotional repression . The novel chronicles Nestor’s deepening alienation and physical dissolution , culminating in his death. The name “Nestor” is common in Hispanic culture, and perhaps it has no significance besides identifying the person who bears it. However, given the military allusion in the novel’s title, it is difficult not to think of Homer’s Nestor in The Iliad, a wise old man to many, yet someone Robert Graves describes as a sanctimonious fool in The Anger of Achilles (1959). The contradictory implications of the name are worth pursuing since they may suggest something fundamental about Nestor’s character. The man has certainly suffered, and his self-destructive retreat from life might well have its origins in the awful things he endured. However, the sensation of uneasiness Nestor engenders so greatly precedes the discovery of the origins of his travails that the reader begins to wonder whether what has always plagued Nestor is not the unfairness of life, but life itself: “Il se laissait glisser, conscient qu’à n’avoir aucune raison de vivre, on n’en a pas non plus pour mourir” (25). While the death of his daughter is an unbearable shock, it seems also to be a catalyst, an experience that frees him to give vent to his anger at existence and more specifically to express this rage in his sustained, ugly treatment of his guilt-ridden wife. It does not matter whether Nestor is right or wrong when he muses, “Pour réussir sa vie, il fallait rester à côté” (34), since the novel indicates that such an option is not available. The strengths of this novel lie in its refusal to state clearly the reasons for Nestor’s disillusionment and to avoid an overtly sympathetic treatment of his plight. Nestor rend les armes is an extended meditation on the unbearable weight of existence and the vanity of human aspiration. While hardly an enticing subject, it is a tribute to the author’s talent that she can for the most part sustain the reader’s interest. Nestor may well be incapacitated by the crippling nature of his own thoughts, but he never becomes a nombriliste. In fact his musings can be so compelling that his relationship to Alice, the rather bizarre doctor, is as annoying to the reader as it is to him. She appears almost as an afterthought in the novel, someone who provides a bit of physical activity in a story otherwise located in one person’s mind. As the story moves toward its conclusion, the author seems to lose confidence in her narrative. Alice plays a larger, yet inconclusive role, and Mélina’s friend, Maria, is revealed to be a prostitute, as if to suggest that emotional distance trumps the pain of feeling. The ending is heavy rather than somber, as the novel’s initial promise remains somewhat unfulfilled. Florida State University William Cloonan GERBER, ALAIN. Je te verrai dans mes rêves. Paris: Fayard, 2011. ISBN 978-2-213-60879-2. Pp. 205. 18 a. Gerber continue ici sa série, entamée depuis 2002, de romans de jazz, des “biofictions ” (Alain Buisine) bénéficiant de sa connaissance de l’univers jazzistique. Toutefois avec ce roman il franchit une nouvelle étape. En effet, Insensiblement 414 FRENCH REVIEW 86.2 (2010), sur Django Reinhardt, s’appuyait sur la recherche musicologique et ajoutait peu d’épisodes fictionnels. Comme pour d’autres musiciens dans des romans précédents, Gerber nous introduisait dans l’imaginaire intime de l’artiste, en conservant ce qui, de la biographie, était avéré. Je te verrai dans mes rêves pousse la fictionnalisation plus loin, puisque le narrateur y est à la recherche d’un musicien qui n’a jamais existé: inventé par Woody...

Consolation by Mireille Calle-Gruber

Yasmina’s acquaintances to present a broader picture: one has lost her home in southern Lebanon to Israeli bombardments; some leave the country to avoid the war; yet another, a Christian, discovers that she is pregnant by the Shiite whom she has secretly married. Yet despite the explosions and smoke, despite the bomb damage, land-mine wounds, and burning buildings, the war seems distant, more news event than personal experience. It is hard to believe that Yasmina really feels that she is living in a nightmare when her life is filled with so much luxury. Her cosmopolitan friends are the sort who, she writes, once made Beirut into the Paris of the Middle East but are being marginalized by growing fundamentalism. She sees the “jeunesse chrétienne” emigrating because of “un environnement hostile” and reflects that “les chrétiens arabes sont à l’origine du tissu social” because they “sont ouverts à d’autres cultures que la leur” (205)—a view which seems to ignore the role of the Christian Phalangists in the Shatila and Sabra massacres of 1982. Yet the politics that interest her are not governmental but interpersonal : “l’amour reste l’alpha et l’oméga de l’existence” (221). Her family, her female friends, and her lover count, as does her work on gender relations, which is ironic considering how she subordinates herself to Marc (though the novel suggests that a change is coming). Important as the book’s concerns are, it is not entirely successful as a novel. Many characters appear only long enough to make a rather stilted speech or two, without much psychological development; the only one with depth is Yasmina herself. The technique, though, is interesting, for the book is composed of three elements: the E-mails to and from friends and acquaintances, Yasmina’s narrations set in roman type, and her reflections on events, in italics. I suspect that many of the E-mails are drawn from those that Boustani herself may have received during the conflict, since her professional life strongly resembles her narrator ’s. She is a professor at the University of Lebanon (with appointments also in Angers and Paris) who has had visiting university positions around the world and who specializes in women’s studies and in linguistics. Her previous scholarly publications have concentrated on Colette, Andrée Chedid, Francophone literature , and gender studies. Like her narrator, she is concerned with the problems, roles, and possibilities of women’s lives in the Middle East and elsewhere. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit CALLE-GRUBER, MIREILLE. Consolation. Paris: Différence, 2010. ISBN 978-2-7291-1893-8. Pp. 192. 15 a. Dès l’entame, ce roman met le lecteur face à la difficulté de construire la trame d’une intrigue mise à mal par la barbarie martiale du monde contemporain. Pourtant, des images font surface, des bribes de phrases, des mots à la dérive qui signalent comme un besoin de faire texte et de reconstruire une mémoire, collective et personnelle à la fois. Cette mémoire serait d’abord celle d’artistes pris dans la tourmente de la guerre et de la déportation, mais aussi celle d’une société qui a besoin, maintenant plus que jamais, de dire et redire la parole des morts et des disparus. Dès lors, mots et phrases se précipitent, se bousculent au portillon de la mémoire, comme si le besoin de dire le trauma, dire le drame, était trop fort et menaçait de déborder la conscience, à la manière du peintre juif recherché par la Gestapo qui lui aussi choisit de peindre, de continuer à peindre malgré et contre 980 FRENCH REVIEW 85.5 tout, contre l’absence, contre la disparition, contre le néant. Mais tenter de faire entendre la parole des morts ou des disparus n’est pas une mince affaire. L’écriture fragmentée, éclatée de Consolation exige du lecteur une attention sans faille et malgré cela, ce dernier perd plus souvent que de coutume le fil d’une intrigue qui a du mal à exister. Certes, c’est l’absence d’histoire et son impossibilité qui donnent au texte sa raison d’être. On ne peut...

The Victorian Marcus Aurelius: Mill, Arnold, and the Appeal of the Quasi-Christian

For John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, and their later Victorian respondents, the Stoic writer and second-century CE Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius represented a test-case for the sufficiency of the ostensibly masculine practices of askesis and detachment as ethical ideals, specifically in the context of Christianity. A brief passage in Mill's On Liberty (1859) comparing Stoic ethics with Christian ethical practice provoked an extended response from Arnold in an 1863 review essay. Mill and Arnold both used comparisons with Christianity to trace the contours and to explore the limits of Marcus Aurelius's ‘lovable’ nature; in doing so, Arnold in particular enacted a peculiar kind of historical sympathy for both the Marcus Aurelius that was and for a missed rapprochement between classical and Christian ethics. For a series of later writers, including freethinkers, religious conservatives and liberal Christians, Marcus Aurelius either promised or threatened to reconcile Stoicism with Christianity. Assessing the...

Des hommes by Laurent Mauvignier

menace la Belgique [...] c’est de devenir un non-pays comme la Suisse, une pure surface diplomatique, un pays à colloques” (51). De longs passages sont consacr és aux antécédents historiques de l’UE, chaque personnage échafaudant une théorie sur les origines et le devenir de l’Europe, ce qui tend fréquemment à assimiler ce roman à un essai. L’auteur a sans doute cherché à mener de front le récit fictionnel et l’essai politico-philosophique, constructions parallèles n’ayant pas pour objet d’aboutir à un traditionnel roman à thèse. La tension entre ces deux composantes du livre (ainsi que la narration éclatée, morcelée, faite de bribes que les lecteurs doivent recouper pour y trouver une certaine continuité) reflète une vision quasi-baroque de l’Europe, toujours en peine de concilier l’unité et la diversit é qui figurent pourtant dans sa devise: “Blocs-séquences d’histoire signifiantes, ajointés péniblement, mal. Attestant de la discontinuité, chose irrémédiable” (295). Constellation constitue un projet littéraire ambitieux, malheureusement alourdi par un excès du jargon qui rend illisible la plus grande partie des documents issus de l’UE. Un livre à l’image de l’Europe: inachevé, constitué de fragments de qualité variable, encore à la recherche d’une cohérence d’ensemble. Western Washington University Edward Ousselin MAUVIGNIER, LAURENT. Des hommes. Paris: Minuit, 2009. ISBN 978-2-7073-2075-9. Pp. 281. 17,50 a. Laurent Mauvignier’s most recent novel, his seventh for the Editions de Minuit, is a dark parable of the ways in which the past inflects the present. Bernard, known familiarly as “Feu-de-Bois,” is a man of sixty-three years whose life has come to nothing. He is an alcoholic; he has no job; he is alienated from his family; he has no friends. After having spent most of his adulthood away from the small village where he grew up, he returns there to live. If indeed one can call that mode of existence “living,” for his principal concern is to indict and belabor the people of La Bassée, those folks who were able to come to terms with the world in ways that he himself found unacceptable. On the occasion of his sister Solange’s sixtieth birthday, violence breaks out, and along with it a spate of remembrance. The novel is narrated by a man named Rabut, who is a cousin to Bernard and Solange. More than anyone else, it is undoubtedly Rabut who represents the kind of compromiser against whom Bernard rails. Rabut is someone who manages to find accommodation in even the most nightmarish situations . Prejudice, injustice, and long-simmering resentment combine to construct a catastrophic present in Des hommes, yet Mauvignier suggests that the origins of that catastrophe must be sought in the past. The particular past that haunts the present in this novel is the Algerian war of independence. Both Bernard and Rabut had enlisted in the army, forty years prior to the narrative “now” of the text, as a way of escaping a grim, rural, and proletarian existence. Both of them served in Algeria for the standard twentyeight months, from 1960 to 1962. Both of them witnessed their share of atrocities, yet they carry those experiences forward in very different ways. They performed their service anonymously, both with regard to their fellow-soldiers and in relation to the native population. Speaking of Bernard, Rabut remarks: “Il n’est pas seul à être seul, ils sont tous seuls ensemble” (161). Both of them wonder, upon occasion, if their service is worthy of that of their fathers, whether at Verdun in the 424 FRENCH REVIEW 84.2 First World War or in the Resistance in the Second. In his worst moments, Bernard imagines himself in the role of the German occupier—and the image of Oradoursur -Glane seems suddenly more apposite to him than does that of Verdun. A very grim secret looms in Des hommes, and from the beginning of the novel Mauvignier tantalizes us with the prospect of finding out just what that secret entails. Some readers may find his game of narrative hide-and-seek a bit wearying after a...

Œuvres complètes: Romans, contes et nouvelles Tome 1: Mademoiselle de Maupin (review)

Reviewed by: Œuvres complètes: Romans, contes et nouvelles Tome 1: Mademoiselle de Maupin Elizabeth Erbeznik Gautier, Théophile . Œuvres complètes: Romans, contes et nouvelles Tome 1: Mademoiselle de Maupin. Texte établi, présenté et annoté par Anne Geisler-Szmulewicz. Paris: Champion, 2004. Pp. 436. ISBN 2-7453-0966-8 If cross-dressing is about the incongruity of appearances, Théophile Gautier's first novel Mademoiselle de Maupin is a study in ambiguous surfaces that can be read for a multitude of meanings. Chronicling the story of a maiden-turned-chevalier, the text has evoked a complex and often contradictory critical reception ever since its 1835 publication. Anne Geisler-Szmulewicz's edition of the novel offers readers a comprehensible version of the text as she elucidates many of the cultural, literary, mythological, and historical references that may be obscure to a 21st-century reader. Her introduction and footnotes to Gautier's novel do more than just situate the reader vis-à-vis the text, however, as they simultaneously consider and address many of the critical debates inspired by the work which is, as Geisler-Szmulewicz notes, republished about every ten years in France and more sporadically abroad (13). Addressing both the text and the scholarly attention it has received, this edition, which includes a bibliography of scholarly work published primarily in French and English, offers readers access to a novel that is very much situated in the literary, social, and political turmoil of Paris in the 1830s. While the novel may have received more critical attention than any of Gautier's other works, there seems to be little consensus on how such a text and its polemic [End Page 331] preface are to be read. Geisler-Szmulewicz describes the difficulty readers and critics have had in merely locating the text within a specific literary genre, noting that ". . . revendiqué d'abord par les romantiques, il l'est aussi par les néo-classiques, puis par les défenseurs de l'art pour l'art" (8). Addressing later claims defining the novel as erotic or decadent, Geisler-Szmulewicz demonstrates how such claims neglect key aspects of the novel, as Gautier evokes various novelistic codes only to later subvert them (39). Blending an epistolary format with lengthy interjections from a third-person narrator and seemingly spontaneous bouts of theatrical dialogue, the text does not fit easily into any category, a key point, as Geisler-Szmulewicz insists, in Gautier's work: "Impossible pour Gautier d'exprimer une position unique, stable et dogmatique, quand il s'agit de réfléchir à la question, centrale dans le roman, de l'identité de l'artiste, de son rapport au monde et à l'oeuvre" (53). Looking beyond genre, her own approach is to view the text as a space in which the young author (he was only 23 when he wrote the novel) could articulate, and presumably explore, his own stance vis-à-vis literature: ". . . ce roman est aussi le lieu où sont réunis tous les grands principes auxquels Gautier se montrera fidèle jusqu'à la fin de sa carrière, une oeuvre qui informe l'ensemble de sa production poétique et romanesque" (9). Given the significant amount of attention paid to genre since the novel's initial publication, it seems fair to state that Mademoiselle de Maupin requires a certain amount of generic decoding, which Geisler-Szmulewicz adequately provides. Like the novel's genre, Gautier's preface has undergone multiple interpretations. Contradicting those who would call it a manifesto or view it as a key to understanding the novel, Geisler-Szmulewicz reads the preface as a romantic response to and against the critics of the era (17). Since attacks on critics, seen as artistes manqués, were a convention of the time, she insists that Gautier's preface was not as novel as later critics have maintained (21). While Gautier is often credited with coining the term "l'art pour l'art," Benjamin Constant had already used the expression as early as 1804 and the defense of "pure art" was a common stance by the 1830s (20). Viewing the preface as a sort of signature, similar to the infamous red vest worn to the opening night...