Reviews 269 père qui pour le punir l’exile dans le désert et lui ravit la parole. La nuit, les Maliens placardent sur les murs de la capitale de curieux grigris prophétiques. Comme les Anonymes, porter un masque signifie défier la loi, dissimuler son identité mais aussi en nier le concept. Les Renards pâles est un texte bicéphale, mi-roman mi-réquisitoire, où l’auteur et son double fusionnent. Le je devient lui, puis nous contre on (le pouvoir) et vous (les embourgeoisés). La France calée dans sa mauvaise foi ignore la violence des “SANS” qui couve. La question est de savoir si le renard pâle recouvre la parole dans cette mouture narrative aux thèmes ressassés,parsemée d’images rituelles hallucinantes et poétiques. Deichel expulsé de son appartement arpente Paris fiévreusement. Haenel vit sagement et confortablement en Italie. Leur désir“d’existence absolue”se réalise-t-il par procuration dans la révolte des masques? La révolte mais après? University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh Yvette A. Young Huston,Nancy. Danse noire.Arles:Actes Sud,2013.ISBN 978-2-330-02265-5.Pp.354. 21 a. Dying of AIDS in a hospital in Montreal, Milo Noirlac mentally composes a film scenario based on the lives of his paternal grandfather, his parents, and himself, helped by the imagined voice of his murdered lover, the American film producer Paul Schwarz. The black dance of the novel’s title refers to the names “Noirlac” and “Schwarz,” to Brazilian capoeira (whose terms label the book’s ten sections), and presumably to the failed relations among the Noirlacs. Milo’s scenario moves among three time periods corresponding to members of the family’s three generations: Neil Kerrigan, who took the name Noirlac when he emigrated from Ireland to Quebec; his shiftless son Declan and Declan’s lover,Awinita, a teenaged Cree prostitute and heroin user; and Milo, their son, who was raised in foster homes and by his rigid aunt until he ran away, ultimately becoming a well-known documentary scenarist. If we can believe Milo’s script, Neil worked for years on an autobiographical novel where he could rewrite his inglorious involvement in the 1916 Easter Rebellion and boast of friendships with Joyce and Yeats, but his daughter burned all his books and papers when he died. Declan was equally inclined to shade the truth, but he had no ambitions, and he did not even fulfill his pledge to look after his son. Milo’s account of himself may be as self-serving as his grandfather’s unfinished novel and his father’s broken promises, and even if Milo is not a mythomaniac, many of the scenes he is composing are clearly fictional, especially those involving his parents, since he did not know them. Whether or not he is telling the truth, Milo is trying to make sense of his life and family by creating something, even if only in his head. For him, as for many writers,“les mots sont aussi réels que [les gens]”(53).Besides family failures and artistic imagination,another theme is oppressors and the oppressed, the latter including the Irish under English rule, Quebeckers governed from Ottawa, and native North Americans and black Brazilians dominated by whites. The various social positions are indicated by language differences, for the text uses not only standard international French and rural Quebec French but also literary English and thickly-accented vulgar English (both translated by the author in footnotes). The novel’s“histoires sont comme des arbres”(52) as they branch out and intersect, but a little pruning might have helped make the story more shapely. There really is such a thing as too much information, and there can be too many elements in a novel just as in a film script: as the imagined Paul warns Milo,“on ne voudrait pas que le public commence à s’ennuyer” (259). In Lignes de faille (2006), Huston made intergenerational conflict interesting; in this novel, unfortunately, she does not find a rhythm that would help it dance. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Jourde, Pierre. La premi...