Reviews 257 who also settled a Jewish community there around 1790. In 1832 Abdelkader chose Mascara as his headquarters. In 1835, the town was reduced to ruins by the French. Control of the town was contested until 1841.Abdelkader, continuously embroiled in military maneuvers, was finally captured and taken to France. For most of the novel he remains imprisoned.Yudah, the chosen one, is led across the desert to Abdelkader’s encampment only to find he is away at war. His defeated followers are later shipped to the island Sainte Marguerite in the Mediterranean. In Abdelkader’s absence, his wives ignore Yudah. Her arrival, unexpected and inopportune, leaves her in isolation, spending her time in long meditative walks. Nostalgia for the desert and wisdom of her people’s ways accompany her. Expelled from the island to France, she continues her quest to find the Emir, to fulfill the mission and expectations entrusted to her. The theme of rapprochement permeates the novel. Symbolic is Yudah’s ride on the donkey: straddling two worlds she makes her way alone, guided by inner resource. Passing from continent to continent, different languages, religions, cultures, all confront and challenge her. Unaided, her life is an apprenticeship in solitude and misfortune. Her unique appearance, demeanor, and a chance occurrence cause her to be absorbed into a troupe of traveling actors who assign to her the role of Racine’s Esther.Commissioned as the troupe’s representative to solicit assistance from Victor Hugo, she serves as messenger between the great writer and her theatrical director. At the time, Paris was a city in turmoil; around 1848, the swing from monarchy to Second Republic was followed by bloody uprisings. The streets of Paris a battleground,Yudah discovers she must navigate barricades to deliver messages. The author weaves the themes of war, exile, and the reconciliation of two worlds into the life of a female whose bitter struggle to fulfill her destiny is borne with gracious acceptance. Vénus Khoury-Ghata is a Lebanese writer who has lived in Paris since 1972. Her understanding of North Africa and her affinity for merging history and fiction make the novel engaging reading. Neumann University (PA) Maria G. Traub Labro, Philippe. Le flûtiste invisible. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-0140534 . Pp. 177. 17,50 a. A frame narrator finds a manuscript and quotes it in full, or retells at length one or more stories that he or she has heard. The device pretends that the frame narration is true but not necessarily the embedded stories. Barbey d’Aurevilly and Maupassant used this popular nineteenth-century literature technique, as did Conrad, Hawthorne, Mary Shelley, and Emily Brontë, among others. Contemporary writers may also use it, but here it feels pleasantly antiquated, partly because of the formal language of the frame narrator who, like Labro himself, is a radio and television personality as well as a writer. Like Labro’s most successful books, L’étudiant étranger and Le petit garçon, this one falls between autobiography and fiction. Labro even quotes from Hemingway’s preface to A Moveable Feast: “Ce livre peut être tenu pour une œuvre d’imagination” (14). As Labro says in an interview, “la mémoire transforme toute réalité.” Here the embedded tales are transformed by the memories of both the original and the frame narrators.A French exchange student is obsessed with a rich American nymphomaniac he meets on the Queen Mary; a sharpshooter with the OAS in Algeria does not assassinate the frame narrator when he could; a Jewish boy avoids Auschwitz and as a young man escapes from Hungary. The first story begins rather like Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”when a grizzled man stops the frame narrator and insists on telling him the story of his transatlantic voyage, which, as his listener says, sounds more like “fantasme” (41) than reality. We are further invited to doubt because, years later, a key detail turns out to be wrong. In the second tale, the frame narrator wonders if Rick, the self-described former sniper, is a “mythomane” (134). Nevertheless, the events Rick recounts correspond to the narrator’s memories of his own...