European ethics. The book addresses the quasi totality of Semprún’s oeuvre. The chapters,“Exile and Identity,”“Politics and the Encounter with History,”“Representing Buchenwald,” “Writing the Other,” and “Europe,” explore elements of Semprún’s “testimonial idiolect”(92): multilingualism (his use of German at Buchenwald to help him survive and his choice of French as second maternal language); literary citations/ allusions as means of deepening ethical commitment (Baudelaire, Claude-Edmonde Magny, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald); painterly references (Patinir,Vermeer,Velásquez, Picasso) to depict “liminal” (84) self-positioning between freedom and hell; and philosophical critique of “radical evil” (75), via Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Levi, and Levinas. Semprún’s witnessing of the dying of others at Buchenwald, such as sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, is given special attention. Tidd shows how“proximity” (121) with death and horror, but also a desire to restore“intimacy”(131) to the other’s dying, often led Semprún to associate fiction and fact. A character in his novel Le grand voyage (1963), “le gars de Semur” who dies in Gérard’s arms as they arrive at Buchenwald, is an early fictional“homage”(131) to real-life model François L., moribund prisoner whose identity Semprún must adopt to evade his own death in Le mort qu’il faut (2001). The gendering of “self-other” relations (34) is carefully examined, with reference to Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe. Semprún“rarely recognizes the situation of women in Europe or the role played by women philosophers, politicians and writers” (161). Women in his trauma writing play the role of Baudelairian “passante” (136), “supporting and stabilizing the identitarian quest of the male subject in his experience of exile and/or his return from Buchenwald” (42). Tidd gives special developmental emphasis to one passante, however, whom Gérard of Le grand voyage encounters before and after her deportation. Her gaze conjures the “utter loneliness and abandonment” (136) of the Jews, spurring Semprún toward an “infinitely open and polyphonic discourse which pays homage to the annihilated Other” (141). Tidd describes Semprún’s work as “a space of historical coincidence and clandestine encounter” with others, as he struggles for “self-transcendence” (166). His writing leads him to espouse a Europe intent on avoiding a repetition of the mortal legacy of Nazi and Soviet totalitarianisms. The book is a convincing articulation of Semprún’s development as European writer of trauma and alterity. University of Kansas Van Kelly Tucker, David, Mark Nixon, and Dirk van Hulle, eds. Revisiting Molloy, Malone meurt/Malone Dies and L’innommable/The Unnamable. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. ISBN 978-90-420-3880-6. Pp. 316. 72 a. Given the status of Beckett’s mid-century trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone meurt, and L’innommable, as landmarks of twentieth-century fiction, and as a central achievement within Beckett’s own storied oeuvre, it is certainly a great lack in recent Beckett 272 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 273 scholarship that there are so few collections of critical essays available on these monumental works, of the kind published by Harold Bloom’s famed series in the 1980s. This lack is acknowledged by Tucker in his introduction to the newest edition of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui, as he reflects on the fact that the current methodologies dominant in Beckett studies today—such as the archival interest in Beckett’s notes and letters, historical and political approaches, and an interest in overlapping media—have often neglected these novels from Beckett’s middle period. They were read with great closeness, perhaps even seemingly exhausted, by critics in the past few decades, when largely philosophical interests reigned, but critics today have mainly moved on to other of Beckett’s works, whether the early novels, or later productions for stage, radio, and television.And so, Tucker asks,“can any of the current ways of mapping other works in Beckett’s oeuvre also make new paths through these novels? What, in summary, might contemporary criticism have to say about the trilogy?”(19). The answers are to these questions, as evidenced by the essays collected here, are overwhelmingly positive and suggest that there is still much new light to be...
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Mar 1, 2017
Nadja Oertelt + 6
Open Access