each of these benighted people: to leave Choir, somehow to escape from this horrible , guano-covered place. Yet with one lone exception, no one has ever been able to do that, so hobbled are they: “Nous trébuchons à chaque pas, et souvent c’est la chute (de là viendrait le nom de Choir)” (55). The exception is a distant ancestor named “Ilinuk,” a figure lost in a past that may be more mythological than factual. Ilinuk did indeed escape from Choir, and he did it in rare style, by way of a homemade rocket. His epic, told again and again by the elderly bard Yoakam, gives the inhabitants of Choir a sense of what they are missing: dignity, courage, and hope. Hope most particularly, perhaps, since just before taking off, Ilinuk had promised to return one day, and his people are waiting for him still. Much luck to them! Apart from the saga of Ilinuk, another chronicle is unfolding here. It is the one the narrator tells. He describes himself as a knacker, and he tends to an apparatus named “Calmar” that resembles a telescope. His chief activity, however, is to catalogue the ills of life on Choir. “J’égrène sans fin le chapelet de nos infortunes,” he says, “ma voix est une dans la clameur plaintive qui monte de tous les pointes de Choir” (239). One voice among many it may be, yet it is nonetheless the one we hear, along with that of Yoakam, which echoes within it. Those two chronicles—one official, the other more personal; one bearing the imprimatur of tradition, the other conceived for this occasion; one nobly hieratic in tone, the other bewailing—question and complement each other in interesting manners. The narrator mentions that many listeners begin to yawn when Yoakam launches into his “interminable récit” (201) once again. Yet the narrator ’s will to say everything that can be said, the principle of “ne rien omettre” (25) that animates his telling, make for a tale unconstrained by economy, one in which nothing, seemingly, is spared. His narrative style is obsessional, iterative, insistent, exhaustive, and wearying. He gives us Choir on Choir’s own terms, as it were. Perhaps his own listeners, like those who sit at Yoakam’s feet, may be forgiven if their attention flags from time to time, or if they begin to envy Ilinuk just a bit, blasting off in his rocket toward very different horizons. University of Colorado Warren Motte DAENINCKX, DIDIER. Missak. Paris: Perrin, 2009. ISBN 978-2-262-02802-2. Pp. 287. 16,90 a. This is a fascinating detective story with serious historical and ideological ramifications. The author combines real people and events with fictional ones to create a kind of documentary novel. The historical center of the work is the execution of French Resistance leader Missak Manouchian, along with his fellow activists, in February 1944. A refugee of Armenian origin, Manouchian devoted and ultimately sacrificed his life for the cause of human dignity and freedom. The fictional element is brought in by Louis Dragère, a reporter for the communist newspaper L’Humanité. Eleven years after the death of Missak, before the dedication of a street in his memory, Louis is asked by his editor to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death. Louis’s mission is to find the lines edited out of a letter written by Missak just before his death. What makes this novel so interesting is its exploration of different ethnic and political milieux in France both during the German Occupation and in the mid1950s . The reader is plunged into a world where communism is the normal way Reviews 611 of looking at society. The protagonist’s parents, friends, colleagues, and mistress have always been dedicated communists, so for Louis any other way of thinking seems alien. Part of what he discovers during his research is that not everyone is a communist and that not all communists think alike. Given the Stalinist conceptions with which he has been imbued all his life and which are the official doctrine of the French Communist Party in 1955, he is genuinely shocked to meet communists who deviate from the party line. Along...
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Nov 1, 2015
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