Reviews 221 roman à clé that provided often malicious portrayals of France’s literary glitterati, Portraits is seemingly a much gentler work. Although its title appears to focus on women, the real portrait is of Sollers viewed from the perspective of the real and imagined women in his life, the women he loved and the ones he created in his fiction. This is clear from the book’s first line, a pastiche of one of Simone de Beauvoir’s more resounding pronouncements, “On ne naît pas homme, on le devient, la plupart du temps à ses dépens” (11). For Sollers the most important part of this quotation is the section he added,“la plupart du temps à ses dépens.” The author seems to imply that if he has become an intelligent and sensitive adult, a good deal of the credit is due to the women he encountered and molded him, at times despite himself, into the man he is today. With Eugenia he experienced the morphing of the purely sexual into the erotic as he learned that“une femme est faite, ou non, pour vous confronter à la vérité physique, à son abîme, à son sillage, à ses éclosions” (35). It was Dominique “qui m’a appris une discipline stricte, la traverse de la vie et des apparences au bout des mots” (40). From one the life of the body and from the other the life of the mind, from one the joy of the transient and from the other the pleasure of turning the passing moment into something which may endure. While these two states of being can appear to be polar extremes, what unites them is the need in each instance for discipline. One is not born, he seems to say, a great lover or a talented writer, but one can at least learn the former if not always the latter, and for him the great teachers in both areas were women. For all its charm, a reader might wonder where Sollers is going with this little text which features graceful writing suffused with a Gallic version of sexual political correctness. Despite the lightness of Sollers’s touch, one suspects a deeper, darker judgment. A tentative response may be found toward the end of the volume. If the first and main section of Portraits is autobiographical, the latter, shorter portion favors a form of literary analysis. It is here one is rather startled to learn that “Toute femme est une Cléopâtre en puissance”(140). If Sollers praises the intelligence, understanding, and patience of women throughout, it is only at the end that he acknowledges in a muted way the incredible power over men that the gentle sex wields. Florida State University William Cloonan Van Cauwelaert, Didier. La femme de nos vies. Paris: Albin Michel, 2013. ISBN 978-2-226-24686-8. Pp. 294. 19,50 a. Prix Goncourt 1994 recipient Van Cauwelaert’s most recent novel is the story of an imposture, but it is first and foremost a love story. The narrator, who is named David Rosfeld, returns to Hadamar hospital in Germany, where he should have died seventy years earlier, to reunite with Ilsa Schaffner, a woman to whom he owes his life. An Internet alert has notified him that Ilsa, for whom he had been searching for decades, is dying and at the very hospital where they first met. At Hadamar, David meets Ilsa’s only living relative, her granddaughter Marianne, who has shunned her grandmother her entire life, ashamed of having a person officially labeled a Nazi in her family. But over David’s lunch invitation, Marianne hears David’s incredible story about his own identity which he hopes will rehabilitate Ilsa’s memory in her eyes. Given up by his Aryan parents to be interned at the Hadamar psychiatric hospital, the narrator,then fourteen-year-old Jürgen Bolt,befriended David Rosfeld,a Jewish orphan whose intelligence quotient would allow him to be sent to an experimental school for gifted children run by Ilsa Schaffner. Then David would work for the Reich rather than die in the gas chamber with the rest of the hospital’s patients. Rather than accept this opportunity, David...
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Jun 22, 2023
Vanessa Gómez Vera 
