ALLAIRE, SUZANNE, et MURIEL TENNE. Présence de Lorand Gaspar. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. ISBN 978-90-420-2591-2. Pp. 197. 40 a. Suzanne Allaire and the late Muriel Tenne have provided readers of Lorand Gaspar a great service. Presenting both aesthetic readings and critical reflection, this study engages in tandem several of Gaspar’s major collections of poems—Sol absolu, Patmos, and Égée—as well as the reflective texts on writing, creativity, and the human condition: Approche de la parole, Feuilles d’observation, and Feuilles d’hôpital. Allaire’s study comprises the first half of the book. As she is careful to observe on several occasions, Gaspar rejects all analysis of his poems based strictly on form as well as those interpretations tied to conceptual frameworks. In response, Allaire states from the outset her intention to study the work as an accompanying reader, attentive to following the poet’s own thought journey and emerging path in poetic writing. In so doing, she is attentive to the poet’s view of language and its role in the conception of poetry. From a consideration of the relationship between doing and being, body and mind, word and life, the quest for knowledge and the thirst for the limitless (chapter one), she turns attention in chapter two to the defining features of the poetry before considering the resistance of the work to all forms of closure or division (chapter three). With subtlety and elegance, Allaire maps out the rich interweavings that emerge from the poet’s work. For her part, Tenne focuses first on the ways by which the encounter between subject and world is effected; second, on the role of silence in leading to the sparseness and the simplicity to which the poet lays claim; and finally, on the movement that leads to the de-centering of everyday speech. In regards to the encounter between subject and world, Tenne uses landscape as a trope for a constructivist model of the real, on which converges the poet’s nuanced approach to language along with his intellectual and philosophical perspective on matter. The description of such a landscape includes attention to mineralogical substance, to body, and to desert, while not excluding attention to movement. It is the manifestation of vigor that particularly interests Tenne. Gaspar privileges the flight of birds, which Tenne deftly reads as a poetic device serving to unify space and numerous olfactory and sonorous elements in the texts (rhythm, timber, silence, and so on). The second chapter considers the mode of poetry’s unarticulated melody: the silence on which all speech opens. Tenne takes care to examine the nature of the tension between silence and speech. Accordingly, the poetic itinerary is marked by such conflicting impulses as movement and proximity, the relationship of subject to the world and the sensing of the word, and by the exploration of language and the experience of physical space and of sensation. The concluding chapter analyses the movement that de-centers the poetic word and includes a probing discussion of the linguistic relationship THE FRENCH REVIEW, Vol. 85, No. 3, February 2012 Printed in U.S.A. REVIEWS Literary History and Criticism edited by Marion Geiger 546 between speaker and addressee that is foundational to the notion of the firstperson as perpetual stranger in language. Within the past few years, Gaspar’s work has given rise to several editions, conference proceedings, and monographs , the most notable including the work edited by Daniel Lançon (2004), the issue of Europe directed by Madeleine Renouard (2005), the book in the Seghers “Poètes d’aujourd’hui” series by Jean-Yves Debreuille (2007), and the recent Lorand Gaspar, en question de l’errance (2010), by Maha Ben Abdeladhim. The collaborative effort by Allaire and Tenne takes its place among these studies, offering complementary approaches that promise to reward all readers interested in the work of one of the most prominent French poets of our age. Calvin College (MI) Glenn W. Fetzer COUNTER, ANDREW J. Inheritance in Nineteenth-Century French Culture: Wealth, Knowledge, and the Family. London: Legenda, 2010. ISBN 978-1-906540-75-3. Pp. x + 205. $89.50. This study takes as its point of...
Read full abstract
Jul 1, 2013
Athanassios Vergados 
Open Access