Reviews the Stars (London: HarperCollins, ), which does not so much loom large in this study as twinkle in its firmament. Even Baldwin’s curt chapter titles echo Bowie’s holophrastic headings. A brief Introduction establishes Baldwin’s titular metaphor: borrowing from André Boucourechliev’s work on Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, Barthes argued that Proust provides no initial theme that is reworked during the Recherche. Rather, he produces diffracted variations without a theme, presenting not the same object in different lights, but different objects ‘in the same light which passes through them’ (p. ). Baldwin’s method mirrors this: his examination of variation is also an enactment of variation. Attention to variations without theme in Beethoven and Proust enables us to understand the ‘aesthetic character their works embody—a category that requires us to be alive to variety rather than to be fixed, unproductively, upon the identification of transcendental themes and their development in works of art’ (pp. –). Avoiding nebulous abstraction, Baldwin connects Barthes’s musings to specific aspects of Proust’s work: ‘the semantic decentring of the Proustian sentence’, for instance, ‘is the textual analogue of Beethoven’s disruption of musical hierarchies, by virtue of which [. . .] the figure of variations on a theme is replaced by the work of variation as (the only) theme’ (p. ). Baldwin’s central claim is an ‘affinity between Barthes’s brief, frequently contradictory references to A la recherche and the emphasis he places, in each of his more studious engagements, on its diffractions, digressions, substitutions, vacillations and variations. Put simply, the punctual inconsistencies of his writing can be viewed as critical echoes and rewritings of the logic of Proust’s text as he sees it’ (p. ). Just as Proust’s novel goes behind what the mind thinks it knows of itself to get inside it, so Baldwin reveals new considerations that otherwise would remain inaccessible. e research and intellectual commitment behind this work are formidable. It is curious that Proust’s and Barthes’s original words are relegated to copious endnotes, typically running to half the length of each chapter. Nevertheless, Baldwin’s kaleidoscopic argument certainly comes to the fore in a monograph that is, in every sense of the word, brilliant. M N I E Making Waves: French Feminisms and their Legacies –. Ed. by M A, A S. F, D H, and I L. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. . xviii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. is volume is a well-researched and all-encompassing investigation of French feminisms, and a true pleasure to read. e book reveals the various forces that have shaped the acquisition of women’s rights in France and debunks some of the commonly believed myths of feminism. e editors’ useful Introduction notably discusses the relevance of the wave metaphor ‘to account for interconnections and crossfertilisations between the diverse currents and movements that have sprung up across the decades’ (p. ), as well as providing a nuanced account of the balancetonporc movement in France. MLR, ., e volume particularly stresses the diversity and creativity of the various forms the movement has taken and still takes in France. It is a shame that none of the chapters in the volume mentions ecofeminism, a term first coined in French by feminist writer Françoise d’Eaubonne in (Catherine Larrère, ‘L’écoféminisme: féminisme écologique ou écologie féministe’, Tracés: Revue de Sciences Humaines, ()