H > H z I H < I o I o I Throughout Courir, the ques tion of performance is constantly at issue?and the same is true of the two books thatpreceded it. In Au piano (2003), Echenoz gave us a fictional concert pianist who is afflictedby stage fright;inRavel,we met a real musician who grapples with his own renown in the last ten years ofhis life,realizing thathe can no longerplay music as he once did. Though his calling isquite different, Echenoz insists thatEmile is likewise an artist, one whose performance follows an ineluctable trajectory. It strikes me that thevery insistence of this motif in Echenoz's recent work is eloquent. He has been playing at thevery top of his game fornearly thirty years now, since the publica tion of LeMeridien de Greenwich in 1979, and at times that must seem like a very long and exhausting race indeed. Warren Motte UniversityofColorado Kossi Efoui. Solo d'un revenant. Paris. Seuil. 2008. 207 pages. 17. isbn978 2-02-097193-5 A revenant means someone who returns, but also a ghost. The nar rator of Kossi Efoui's third novel, who returns tohis childhood home, is, like a ghost, caught in a web of remembering and forgetting in which the present and the past are linked indirectly, inconclusively. "We never hear all thevoices in the same history at the same time." He feels he is someone standing on a raftdriftingaway fromshore and at the same time someone watching the raftdriftoff. One of three young men who had started a street theater in an invented land called South Gloria before the war, the narrator left to work in North Gloria just before While details suggest Africa,Gloria could be any country in theworld, a country where women walk through the streetscryingthe names of the dead, where everyone is suspected of not havingthe right "totem," where the officials, inventing liesto explain what happened, promote peace and reconciliation by constructing monuments. hostilities began between rival groups, hostilities that lasted ten years and devastated the country, killingmany thousands. He returns to find thatone of his theaterpart ners, who had established a school to protect abandoned children, com mitted suicidewith the children and his wife to avoid being massacred by the rebel forces.The other friend fromhis youth, however, joined the rebel radio and helped spread the propaganda that inspired themassa cres. When he finds this man, whom he intended to kill, the narrator can not pull the trigger.He remains immobile, rather like a ghost, unable to findwords to describe what he The story is partially based on the Rwandan genocide (where humans were hunted down like ani mals), but Efoui has made it univer sal. The demarcation zone between North Gloria and South Gloria is manned by a neutral international force of South Africans, Malaysians, Pakistanis, and Belgians, in charge of local soldiers who had cut bush for roads but also had cut throats. While details suggest Africa, Gloria could be any country in theworld, a country where women walk through the streets crying the names of the dead, where everyone is suspected of not having the right "totem," where the officials, inventing lies to explain what happened, promote peace and reconciliation by con s true ting monuments. Everyone has been contaminated by the violence. The inhabitantsof South Gloria con tinually tell thenarratornot to forget that "we are a country at war." A seventeen-year-old rebel describes for a television camera what it felt like "the first time," not sex but killing: he no longer recognized his own voice. The narrator comments satiri cally on Chinese construction crews, American humanitarian aid, tele vision commercials. Such satire is combined with images of desolation. Young girls who gave birth after being raped by rebel soldiers sit rigid and sulking, like child royalty, "whom chance took from thepotty to the throne." Kossi Efoui, a Togolese novelist and dramatist living in France since 1990, sets the events of his novel as short theatrical scenes. Solo d'un ^^^k revenant is beautifully written, rich inpoetic imagery. Adele King ^^^k Paris MUNI.I.MllllilMMIMIMMMMIIIMMIIIIIMIIIIMM 66 i World Literature Today ...