WORLD LITERATURE IN REVIEW.

FRENCH

Fiction

Francois Bon. Impatience. Paris. Minuit. 1998. 95 pages. 65 F. ISBN 2-7073-1625- 3.

According to the author, time spent in dark, empty theaters as well as a line from Agrippa d'Aubigne-"Je parle dans la colere"-served as the inspiration for Impatience. The resulting work, neither a novel nor a play, is a postmodern treatment of anger and frustration illustrated by fragments of monologue, dialogue, and italicized commentary by nameless, barely visible characters (le narrateur, l'homme, la femme, le philosophe, et cetera) in a dark theater which serves as a microcosm for the modern city.

Francois Bon is concerned with language, and in his latest work he demonstrates its incapacity to express our deepest pain in the modern urban setting which renders us mute. This is reflected in the comments of the personnages who apparently perform before an empty audience in the dark theater. Their inability to express themselves and their impatience to do so is presented against a backdrop of the urban wasteland-parking garages, ATM's, stoplights, and walkways to shopping malls, to name a few-everything that prevents human interaction and communication. At the same time, however, the narrative reflects a grappling with language, a "re-forming" of both vocabulary and syntax by means of neologisms and convoluted structure.

The "impatience" with language, the lessive des mots apparent throughout the work is also reflected in various italicized commentaries concerning the inadequacy of the novel. In lieu of fiction, the nameless, hidden narrateur (yet another attempt to remove the author from the text) proposes a pure, documentary form of presentation, preferably an inventory of names of cities one has traveled to along with the disparate comments made by the infinite number of visitors to each locale.

Le livre qui decrirait cela se suffirait a lui-meme, et c'est pour rejoindre cette surface de l'aventure dispersee et insuffisante des hommes qu'on recreerait l'illusion de sa representation . . . lieu des paroles qui pourtant n'est pas plus que ce livre qu'on dresse, pour les capter et les renvoyer sur la ville.

Here, Bon's choice of the verb dresser, "to erect or to build," illustrates his use of language throughout, for in this work he is erecting a representation of the empty, modern city in the black theatrical space. The use of words such as dessus and dessous give a vertical perspective to the imagery he suggests. Visions of parking garages below lead to ramps above, which in turn lead up to shopping areas, et cetera. The overall effect is an inventory of concrete desolation which stifles our voices and makes us powerless.

The works of Francois Bon have placed him among the avant-garde of contemporary literary stylists. In Impatience he has found a vehicle emphasizing the importance of words and individual expression, an angry scream in the empty silence around us. Although one can appreciate the author's preoccupation with words, the novel, and meaning, one cannot help but see the similarities between these preoccupations and those of Sartre, Sarraute, and numerous other nouveau romanciers. To some, "Je parle dans la colere" might suggest "Tout est dit."

Donald J. Dziekowicz

University of St. Thomas (Mn.)

Michel Braudeau. Perou. Paris. Gallimard. 1998. 125 pages. 75 F. ISBN 2-07- 075273-9.

The title indicates that Michel Braudeau has under-taken a project more ambitious than a story of adolescent love between a blonde, blue-eyed Peruvian girl, Maria-Sabina (the illegitimate daughter of a Finnish psychiatrist!), and a young Frenchman, clearly the narrator himself, who has arrived in Lima to teach French. He immediately has the impression of "a country where everything is upside down." He is confronted with a culture composed of a mixture of various ethnic elements: of the Amerindians, and of Spanish, French, Portuguese, even Oriental settlers, a society of "tant d'humanites melees." At the Sorbonne he had become friends with Rulfo Etxerros, son of a wealthy diplomatic family from Lima. Through their influence, his French friend got a teaching appointment, and Rulfo invited him to come for a visit at his family's hacienda. There the young Frenchman caught his first glimpse of Rulfo's sixteen-year-old sister, Maria- Sabina, who, stripped to the waist, was engaged in painting shutters! He was immediately overwhelmed with desire, which grew with each of their encounters.

During the holidays, Rulfo and his brothers left on vacation, and Dolores, their mother, invited the narrator to come and stay at the hacienda. After dinner the first evening, Maria-Sabina whispered to him, "We'll sleep together tonight." Later he made his way discreetly to her room. Although they undressed and lay down, she would not permit him to make love: "I said we'd sleep together." The incident profoundly depressed him. When Rulfo returned, he decided that he must help "Miguelito." So he convoked a group of Indians to set up a native ceremony used to treat nervous disorders. (Like several of his French contemporaries, notably J. M. G. Le Clezio, Braudeau deeply admires Amerindian culture, its mythology, its poetry, its integral relation with the natural world-and even its medical practices.) The Indians came to the hacienda, built a huge fire in the garden, and flung into it various hallucinogenic native herbs. They seated "Miguelito" beside the fire and began dancing and chanting, and soon he was dancing with them "to chase away the demons." After this night of magic, he felt at last an inner peace. Still, frustrated that his relations with Maria-Sabina had come to nothing, the narrator decided to return to Paris. There Rulfo's father, on his way to rejoin his post in Vienna, informed Miguelito of the military uprising in Peru. He also reported that Maria-Sabina was suddenly getting married to an architect named Ramon and wondered why they were in such a hurry. A letter from Rulfo explained the reason: Maria-Sabina had given birth to a baby girl. And the thought crossed the narrator's mind: what may have happened that night when they were "just sleeping together." Back in Lima a year later, after having accompanied Rulfo on a trip to the Amazon, he encounters Maria-Sabina, who proposes that they go horseback riding through the forest. Passing by a river, she says that she wants to go for a swim. They strip and in the water he seizes her by the waist and penetrates her, finally obtaining what he had lusted after for so long. Two years pass before he returns to Peru, where tragic news awaits him. Maria-Sabina has been killed by a group of fanatic guerrilleros, who took her for a blonde "gringo," an enemy of the revolution. Soon after, he learns that Ramon has been captured and executed by the police.

"Poetic" as the brief, hallucinatory contacts between Maria-Sabina and the narrator may seem to have been, the reader will perhaps find greater substance in the frequent, perceptive commentaries of Braudeau (more at ease, it would seem, with "ideas" than with "romance") on the culture melangee of Latin America, its Amerindian heritage, and the beauty and mystery of its mountains and great forests.

John L Brown

Washington, D.C.

Andree Chedid. Lucy: La femme verticale. Paris. Flammarion. 1998. 94 pages. 90 F. ISBN 2-08-067551-6.

Born in Egypt, the French author Andree Chedid has made Paris her home since 1946. In addition to nearly thirty volumes of poetry, she has published novels, short stories, plays, and essays, for which she has received numerous prestigious awards, most recently the Prix Albert Camus in 1996. Lucy falls under the rubric of recit, which Chedid defines elsewhere as a true story related as a fable or parable. La femme de Job, written in 1993 (see WLT 68:3, p. 524), is another example of this genre in Chedid's works.

As the title suggests, Lucy: La femme verticale was inspired by the female hominid skeleton known as Australopithecus afarensis, which was discovered by Dr. Donald Johanson in 1974 in the Hadar region of Ethiopia and has since become a cultural icon. Lucy is written in three parts. The first, "L'appel," introduces a recurrent theme in Chedid's works: the puissance of the "call" of an inner voice. The tale begins with Lucy's interior monologue and her response to the call that impels her to stand erect. Because Lucy lacks speech, she appropriates the voice of the female narrator at the threshold of the third millennium. This fusion, the narrator tells us, is made possible by the evolutionist perspective that all living things originated in the stars. Through her narrator, Chedid posits the alliance between "the fable and the real": Lucy, who heretofore existed only in the narrator's dreams, will become a reality for her. At the crux of Chedid's parable lies the fundamental query of the creative artist at the turn of the millennium: do we know any truth beyond our own fictions?

In the short story "Apres le jardin" (from Mondes, Miroirs, Magies, 1988; see WLT 62:4, p. 720), which was revised in an artistic collaboration as Le jardin perdu, Chedid explores the myth of the Fall as it relates to the question of individual autonomy. In Lucy she revisits the primordial world of the Garden before the birth of humankind. Lucy's response to the call of her inner voice leads the narrator to reconsider the proverbial dilemma of man's inhumanity to man. In the second part of the parable, "Le crime," the narrator plots to kill Lucy and thereby preserve the world's innocence. However, in the final section, "Le desir," she returns to the beginning of her story and rewrites it. As the narrator witnesses once again Lucy's struggle to stand, she recognizes in her simian ancestor her own aspiration to exceed the limitations of the flesh. Finally, moved by the appeal in Lucy's eyes, the narrator helps her to stand. Lucy's desire to stand upright becomes the narrator's desire for life, ultimately reflected in the dreams of the creative imagination.

The author's sonorous, forceful prose creates a rhythmic counterpoint to the struggle she depicts. With deceptively transparent imagery and a fluidity of language closer to poetry than to prose, Andree Chedid re-creates one of the important myths of Western thought, recasting it in the light of the third millennium.

Judy Cochran

Denison University

Regine Detambel. Elle ferait battre les montagnes. Paris. Gallimard. 1998. 123 pages. 75 F. ISBN 2-07-075042-6.

Ever since Francoise Sagan, only nineteen, published Bonjour, Tristesse (1954), which rapidly became an international best seller, increasing numbers of talented, innovative young ladies have been attracted to a literary career. Among the recent recruits-Marie Darrieussecq (Truismes; see WLT 71:4, p. 746), Lorette Nobecourt (Le Demangeaison), and Nina Bouraoui (La voyeuse interdite; see WLT 67:1, p. 145), and others who have been creating a modest feminist wave in end-of-the-century French writing-Regine Detambel stands out as "the leader of the pack." Just thirty, she has already published some nineteen volumes. Critics have pointed out that members of "the pack" reject the idea of "the novel" and do not pretend to "tell a story" but rather draw up "a list of their sensations," to keep a balance, sophisticated and somewhat perverse, between "le mouille et le sec, l'exercice video et la chronophotographie." They all cultivate "the ecstasy of the senses." The heroine of Detambel's 1995 novel Le ventilateur (see WLT 70:4, p. 906)-she is never given a name, remaining anonymously "She"-finds her greatest erotic pleasure in savoring "His" body fluids and in rapturously cleaning his navel!

Like Detambel's prior volumes, Elle ferait battre les montagnes has no narrative line. It consists of fifty brief passages, some less than a page in length. In the house of her grandfather, Martin, a little blonde girl (we never learn her name), "un petit ange," is passing the summer with her godmother, Tatie, the sister of Martin, and with her young cousin David, his grandson. From the opening pages, her magnificent "golden locks," magical in their power of attraction, dominate this "fable." As in Le ventilateur, things are more important than persons. (This preoccupation with objects reflects the influence of Francis Ponge, of Georges Perec, and of Robbe-Grillet, who "disdains the picturesque and the fictional in order to dwell on objects which form and deform his characters." And indeed, Hair would be a suitable title for this curious performance. (Detambel's fixation on hair occurs in earlier works, notably in Le ventilateur, where "She" revels in caressing "His" body hair from head to toe with her tongue.) The "petit ange" and her cousin play together in the wood in front of the house and wade in the stream that flows through it. The radiance of the girl's hair makes the water glow and causes little fish, attracted by "le halo de sa chevelure," to rise to the surface and circle around her. The wood, however, is not tranquil. Crowds of hunters are shooting birds, and one day a stray bullet hits the girl in the head but, burrowing into the thick mass of her hair, does not wound her. It remains there unperceived, until one day David, fondly caressing her head, discovers it. Determined that it must be removed, he takes her to the village barber. As great locks of her hair are cut and fall to the floor, David picks up a few, puts them in his pocket, and later throws them in the stream, "comme des cendres de mort."

Tatie is furious that her goddaughter's hair has been cut, thus depriving her of her magical charm. The "petit ange" no longer exists. Without her golden crown, she is no longer the child the family has adored. The mythical little princess is dead. And death, in reality, soon arrives. One evening she is sitting outside while hunters are firing away in the wood. A bullet, unimpeded by thick, protective hair, hits her behind the ear and she falls dead. The fable ends as Tatie summons up memories of the baptism of the baby, whose "petite tete opulente" completely covered her mother's breast.

Concluding this technically disciplined minimalist text, the reader may well long for a slight show of emotion. He can admire the work of Detambel as "an expert engraver on metal" while feeling a nostalgia, anachronistic if you wish, for the sensibility of a Colette.

John L Brown

Washington, D.C.

Annie Ernaux. La honte. Paris. Gallimard. 1997. 133 pages. 70 F. ISBN 2-07- 074787-5.

---. "Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit". Paris. Gallimard. 1997. 112 pages. 60 F. ISBN 2-07-074788-3.

Annie Ernaux's two most recent books appeared almost simultaneously in late 1997. They serve as bookends to each other-similar in their need to disclose a certain truth about an essential event or time in Ernaux's life yet dissimilar in their approach and success.

Presented more as an ethnological study, La honte recounts a long-passed moment which distances the young narrator from her parents (and from the reader). The work serves to disclose her realization, at the age of twelve, of social exclusion and of the existence of two worlds which are inherently separate. The event that leads to this definitive moment of childhood occurs when, on a June day in 1952, "mon pere a voulu tuer ma mere." The young narrator's intense shame at this incident results in her basic desire to write: "C'est elle qui est au fond de mes livres." This pivotal event in the young Ernaux's life appears banal, however, and her attempts to create a book out of it render her style flat.

The second book, "Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit", whose title reiterates Ernaux's mother's last written communication, is less introspective. Presented as diary notes jotted in passing as a daughter experiences her mother's descent into Alzheimer's disease, the work provides an excellent companion to Ernaux's earlier text, Une femme (1988). The narrator's stated purpose (to destroy the unity or coherence of the previous work) intrigues the reader, who is instructed to read these pages as "le residu d'une douleur." Certain phrases from Une femme reappear here in slightly modified form-"Est-ce qu'ecrire, et ce que j'ecris, n'est pas une facon de donner?"-and thus give the reader a glimpse into the author's writing process.

In addition, Ernaux's thorough identification with her mother ("je suis 'elle'") becomes a role reversal: "elle est ma petite fille." Shortly thereafter, we read, "Aveuglant: elle est ma vieillesse, et je sens en moi menacer la degradation de son corps." These charged moments shout out Ernaux's pain and display the potential power of her objective, neutral style, composed of few but poignant details.

Whereas her objective style paradoxically permits the reader to sense her devotion to her mother and her distress at her impending degradation and death, it also reveals Ernaux's egocentric attitude. Despite her frequent visits to her mother as well as her touching efforts to feed and groom her, the way the text reverts to the writer's je can be disconcerting.

Although "Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit" provides both a moving elegy to the author's mother and a fresh approach to the events that inspired Une femme, a combined reading of this work and La honte suggests that Annie Ernaux has already given the reader the most powerful versions of her past.

E. Nicole Meyer

University of Wisconsin, Green Bay

Irene Frain. L'Inimitable. Paris. Fayard. 1998. 577 pages. 145 F. ISBN 2-213- 59854-1.

Most of us have been brought up admiring the greatness of Rome, the glory of its leaders, and in awe of Egypt, the Pharaohs, their art, the majestic pyramids, and their long-lasting and rich culture; but it takes the admirable recit and passionate evocation of Irene Frain to make us discover another side-often somber, violent, and cruel-of the lives, always intense, often corrupt, of the three great heroes Julius Caesar, Antony, and Octavius on the side of Rome and Cleopatra, queen of Egypt, mother and lover of Caesar and, after the latter's death, of Antony.

Page after page, Irene Frain sketches a fascinating portrait of the society and families of these great characters of history. We discover that incest, murder, plotting, and poisoning were in their blood even at an early age, and that children, parents, relatives, and friends could be dispatched at any time to satisfy a whim or, most often, to quench a thirst for power. The Romans-Caesar first, and Antony second-lived a dream, the dream of accomplishing Alexander's supreme task of becoming masters of the round earth, of the world, after conquering India. Cleopatra, who named herself "L'Inimitable" (the unique or inimitable one, the one who cannot be equaled or surpassed), managed from early adolescence until her death to be involved with the Roman emperors' dream, first with Caesar, who gave her a son, Caesarion, and then with Antony after Caesar's murder on the Ides of March.

Cleopatra's stature grew throughout her life, as a lover, as a mother, as a leader of men, as a spender of fortunes in gifts for her lovers and in orgiac feasts; but most of all Cleopatra was a supreme diplomat, a fine tactician, a clever friend, and a terrible foe. No wonder that her enemies hated her, and no one so much as Octavius, whose goal in life was to get rid of Antony and to enslave and humiliate Cleopatra before killing her. To this end, Octavius spread the most vicious lies and accusations about Cleopatra, whom he portrayed to Rome as a triple whore and a servant of the devil. Nevertheless, Cleopatra retained all along her superb dignity as a woman, remaining a faithful lover particularly to Antony, no matter how badly he treated her. No matter how threatened, how depressed, Cleopatra remained to the end-almost-a first-rate politician, capable of leading armies and commanding her fleet and always at the side of her men when they needed her or simply her money. Still, Octavius was robbed of the ultimate pleasure of humiliating her and putting her to death: she remained the "inimitable" to the end, dying from her own hand and remaining always in control of her destiny, even when everything else was lost. Cleopatra also won a posthumous victory: Octavius would not succeed in conquering the Parthes and would not be able to achieve the unachieved dream of Alexander, Caesar, and Antony. In the long run Cleopatra in her very death remained supreme, "inimitable."

Irene Frain's recit is brilliant, fascinating; page after page she captivates her reader, who cannot wait for the next page, or the one after that. Frain is a remarkable writer whose prose is enticing and vivid. Caesar, Octavius, Antony, Cicero, and Cleopatra all come alive, made of flesh and blood, human and superhuman at the same time. L'Inimitable is a recit, surely, but it is no made- up pseudohistorical tale. Personal and passionate as it is, the novel is based on honest historical research, and as such it is surely no less admirable than Barbara Tuchman's classic A Distant Mirror in a similar register.

L'Inimitable is a much-anticipated monument to the memory of Cleopatra, the last great queen of Egypt, just as the pyramids are eternal and unique monuments to the great history of Pharaonic Egypt. And the value of the book does not stop there; it may also lead to some sobering reflection on how the history of great men and women can affect the destiny of nations and civilizations.

Guy R. Mermier

University of Michigan

Milan Kundera. L'identite. Paris. Gallimard. 1997. 164 pages. 89 F. ISBN 2-07- 075194-5.

The Boston Globe correspondent Bill Marx remarked on Ann Beattie's latest novel, Park City: "The irony of Beattie's success is that she has already said what she has to say-invention has given way to exhaustion." This quote is a perfect fit for Milan Kundera's latest novel, L'identite, published in the French original in April 1997 and immediately followed by Linda Asher's English translation. The "brand new" title L'identite-following Kundera's recent single-noun titles La lenteur (1995; Eng. Slowness; see WLT 70:2, p. 352) and L'immortalite (Eng. Immortality)-reveals the theme of the novel, and as new and novelistic as it may look, in fact it is not.

The novel touches upon the topic of both fictional and authorial identity. At the novelistic level, there is a search for the physical and emotional identity of lovers: Chantal, a middle-aged woman and advertising executive, and her lover Jean-Marc, a younger man, nondescript professionally; but there is also a search for artistic identity at the level of the narrator's creativity, and finally a search for authorial identity at the level of the author, Milan Kundera himself. All these aspects of identity-search have been seen in Kundera's previous works. As in The Joke, Laughable Loves, and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, identity is fictionalized within the disparity between the body and soul, the line being drawn between the physical features and acts of the human body (eyelids, kissing, et cetera) and the characters' internal turmoil. The game involving the anonymous love letters that Jean-Marc sends to Chantal after she tells him she no longer attracts men is an old game in a brand new package-we have seen it in The Hitchhiking Game-but now with a fresh, poignant voice and message. The literary allusions to Cyrano de Bergerac's visionary use of fantasy as endowed in Jean-Marc's rationalizing are weak attributes in Kundera's novel. The typical Kundera joke is absent, unless the author intends Chantal's ignorance as a painfully obvious one: while Chantal plays the soap-opera-type guessing game of who's-the-letter-writer, the reader easily recognizes the author as Jean-Marc.

There has been a decline in artistic mastery in Kundera's last two novels, both written in French rather than in his native Czech; however, Slowness represented a thrilling buffoonery of the novelistic and authorial characters, including Kundera himself. The pillar of Slowness was Mr. Cechoripsky, a pathetically ridiculous Czech entomologist, whose presence elevated the novelistic dullness to the literary level of Kundera's previous novels written in Czech. The irony of L'identite is that the author has failed his novel because he has thrown away his Czech identity and assumed an outwardly more prestigious French identity (both cultural and linguistic). This new identity does not suit him well. It has not allowed him to expand as an author: with his French identity he is only able to say in plain language what he has already said; and that "old" message he no longer conveys as masterfully as he once did.

Karen von Kunes

Yale University

Francoise Mallet-Joris. La maison dont le chien est fou. Paris. Flammarion. 1997. 408 pages. 130 F. ISBN 2-08-066999-0.

In her latest novel, La maison dont le chien est fou, the Belgian-born Francoise Mallet-Joris, much honored for her two dozen books of fiction, essays, and history, shuttles back and forth between the 1890s and 1917, mingling historical figures with imaginary ones. Within the Paris settings familiar to her readers- the high and modest bourgeoisies, the impoverished nobility, the government and art circles-she examines individual responses to vast public events of those years, from the Dreyfus Affair and the Combes government's subsequent measures establishing separation of church and state, to the turmoil of World War I. Closer to home, the protagonists are enmeshed in the machinery of family relationships, burdened by the old intrigues of parents who bartered for power in the currencies of dowries, titles, properties, businesses.

Three pairs of sisters are interlinked within the story, among them two English art students, Amy Foster and her adoring adopted sibling Laura, whose marriage to a talented young artist, Etienne Aubertin, becomes the focus of the plot. Idle gossip and official inquiry both pick away at the husband's reluctance to defend himself against suspicion of murder after Laura's disappearance. Naive young Violette Andre, making her living in Paris following the closure of her convent by the Combes government, finds herself deeply involved in the case, as tenant in Etienne's house on the Rue Vaugirard and as secretary to Alphonse Bertillon, an actual police pioneer in the anthropomorphic identification of criminals. Violette, finding herself an unwitting dupe of her loyal sister's conniving police-commissioner husband-in effect she has been planted as a spy in both her lodgings and her job-nevertheless rises to Etienne's defense.

The Durandeau sisters add an element of would-be aristocracy and a family atmosphere of suppressed sibling rivalry that erupts in recriminations. Isabelle Durandeau had been Violette's superior at the convent, whereas the socialite sister, Fanny, won the dubious prize of marriage to Count Dante Pallavicini. The fitfully charming Italian, with his impoverished family's legacy of mad eccentricity, covets for its aura of scandal a double portrait of Laura and her sister painted by Etienne just before the disappearance.

The text contains passages of ironic exposition-the second Dreyfus trial, for instance, when exoneration for the Jewish officer was quickly followed by an official pardon generally received as puzzling contradiction. The truth about Laura's disappearance gradually emerges through a skillful mix of dialogue in which, typically, the subject matter and attitudes alone reveal the speakers' identities, and a selective omniscience that leaves lingering pockets of mystery. Questions of guilt and innocence recur as the author dissects motives and reactions surrounding key events withheld until the end.

The enigmatic title La maison dont le chien est fou, taken from a Polish saying that wolves are drawn to the house with a mad dog, suggests that misfortune attends on signs of trouble. Yet in these characters, forbearance and sensitive optimism seem more operative than fate. While Francoise Mallet-Joris works her readers hard, the complexity of her presentation effectively mirrors the chaos of lives shaken by compelling private and public events during a period of great change in France.

Lee Fahnestock

New York

Christine Orban. L'ame sour. Paris. Albin Michel. 1998. 126 pages. 78 F. ISBN 2- 226-10011-3.

A delicate paean to sisterly love and loss, Christine Orban's novel L'ame sour is supposedly written as a testament to the narrator's younger sister Maco (short for "Ma Corinne"), who died suddenly after announcing her pregnancy joyously over the phone. Chris, the older sister, devotes herself to resurrecting their relationship, with its secret language and innate understanding. In the first part of the book she relives the happy, endless days of childhood the two girls spent together in an Algerian paradise they both knew they would eventually have to leave. Interspersed amid these idyllic recollections is the narrator's searing consciousness of grief and need.

The book resurrects Maco in all her vitality, willfulness, curiosity, and exuberance. She is portrayed as exploratory and exultant, more pragmatic than Chris, preferring reality to imagination, the present to the future. Maco's story unrolls bit by bit, in brief film clips, joined together by Chris's saddened commentary, evoking sights and sounds and smells connected with their native Maghreb. We learn almost everything about Maco's short life, from her birth and early childhood-trailing contentedly behind her older sister-to her aborted stay in Paris, marriage to a handsome Moroccan, motherhood, and slow, painful annihilation at the hands of her authoritarian husband.

Underlying the younger girl's bio is the fatality of trying to live life with abandon. We know next to nothing about Chris's life and marriage, for her entire being is taken up with Maco, her double, her ame sour. She and Maco invert their natural roles, the younger becoming the leader and comforter of the psychologically warped older sister. Much of the book is devoted to the latter's untenable grief at losing her only friend.

Chris loves childhood so much, she never wants to grow up (and perhaps she never really does). Maco precedes her into adolescence, dating, dancing, and reveling in men. Chris retreats into words, papering the walls of their shared room with quotations from favorite writers and in turn becoming a writer herself. Maco lives; Chris writes about living, especially about Maco's life. Chris blames herself for allowing Maco to marry, for not insisting she end the pregnancy that ultimately kills her. Unable to recover from her sister's death, Chris carries Maco within herself, asking her questions to which there is never an answer, recalling their private language which she is now the only person to remember. Maco lives on within her, Chris feels. At other times she thinks she is merely inventing Maco, because otherwise she could not go on living. Chris weeps for her sister, ashamed of the comfort her tears provide: "Puisque les etres humains sont si fragiles qu'ils peuvent exister un jour et disparaitre le lendemain, aimer, c'est prendre le risque de mourir autant de fois que l'on aime."

Slight though it may be in size and scope, L'ame sour treats an uncommon subject with tenderness, compassion, and-yes-love. Its evocation of sisterly devotion is moving and memorable.

Gretchen Rous Besser

New School University

Pascal Quignard. Vie secrete. Paris. Gallimard. 1998. 465 pages. 130 F. ISBN 2- 07-074879-0.

At the age of fifty, Pascal Quignard, author of some forty books, of which Vie secrete is the most recent, has acquired a reputation as one of the most original, disconcerting, unclassifiable, and truly degage writers of his generation. The son of a philology-professor father and a music-teacher mother, he evinced the durable influence of this family background on his career and on his literary production. An uomo universale of our time whose impressive erudition is tinged with pedantry, he has an extensive acquaintance with Greek and Latin literature (frequently cited in Vie secrete), which inspired such works as Le sexe et l'effroi (on Roman sensuality) and Aprodemia Avitia. His interests extend beyond Europe, however, to include e.g. an admiration of traditional Chinese literature, especially Lao-Tse, more appealing to him than the socially conformist Confucius. His passion for music, especially of the Baroque (he founded a festival of Baroque opera in the chateau de Versailles), evident in Vie secrete, surfaces notably in Salon de Wurtemberg and Escaliers de Chambord as well as in Tous les matins du monde, for whose film version he wrote the screenplay and the musical score. His nonfiction includes La lecon de musique, Rhetorique speculative, and translations from the classical languages. He also takes a keen interest in the plastic arts, having published an essay on Georges de la Tour, and frequently comments on primitive frescoes such as those in the caves of Lascaux.

Much of this erudition finds its way into Vie secrete, and the result does not make for easy reading. Indeed, the work is neither a novel nor an autobiography nor a psychological or linguistic essay, but rather a massive notebook. Quignard declares that he wished "to abandon every genre," to create "une forme scissipare, court-circuitante, ekstatikos." Here, for the first time, he sheds the mask of erudition and reveals something of himself, of his sentimental life. As a young man, he fell in love with his music teacher, to whom he gives the name "Nemie Satler," a gifted pianist much older than he, whom he accompanied on his violin. She was not sentimental but rather "d'un caractere cassant, dur, exigeant." Their affair lasted "exactement 91 jours"! And he also speaks of "M" (apparently his present companion) and of their sojourn on the Italian Riviera. He has greater passion for the mysteries of language and is constantly searching to discover the ancient origins of familiar words, their "vie secrete." He seeks the source of amour and believes that it comes from a word "qui cherche la mamelle," from "amma, mamma, mamelle." (The reader would do well to keep Greek, Latin, and etymological dictionaries at hand in seeking to penetrate the "secret life" of Quignard's prose!) His pages abound in brief, maximlike phrases which reflect his admiration for the Moralistes: "The individual finds his joy in cutting himself off from society"; "Having a soul means having a secret"; "Time past preys on time present."

Quignard now lives in retirement, after years of feverish activity, as "un ecrivain degage." He does not frequent the literary cafes of Saint-Germain, does not attend congresses, does not give lectures or sign books. Disdainful of literary movements of the day, whether deconstructionism or postmodernism (existentialism is old hat!), he proclaims defiantly that he belongs to "le groupe anti-tous" and that the present generation would probably agree with him. He rejoices that in his rejection of society he has found an independence which "enchants and guides" him. He can spend most of his time reading, and "reading and love" resemble each other closely; both are "magic carpets which carry you away from an enslaving human society." Poets and literati should always be "en rupture, en marge." Quignard aspires to be "plus individuel que collectif." He refuses to be "socially integrated." But why does he devote himself so passionately to "transforming the past"? Because this is the way "to transform the future."

John L Brown

Washington, D.C.

Nathalie Quintane. Jeanne Darc. Paris. POL. 1998. 77 pages. 65 F. ISBN 2-86744- 610-4.

The cynical summer of 1998 is not conducive to an appreciation of this tale of Joan of Arc (although it is not unlikely that it would always have been a book to trigger "constant reader's" gag reflex). Told in many voices, both internal and external, objective and subjective, Jeanne Darc, as envisioned by Nathalie Quintane, recounts more than most ever sought to know about the heroine and her imagined progressive sanctification: "During the first part of her existence, Joan is careful to eat on only one side of her mouth (essentially the right side)." Unfortunately, the question then posed-"Spit or swallow?"-now has a peculiar immediate resonance. The book attempts to make us see what the always (self-)conscious Joan saw, feel what she felt, hear what she heard, think what she thought, from her childhood to The End-to know and care for her as much as she apparently did.

It is difficult to believe that, despite its blessed brevity, the book suffers from longueurs, not to mention languors. The volume's seventy-seven pages-some, for no obvious reason, devoted to single, unimportant sentences ("I learned what a corridor was, as it was a new word, and few of them existed in our countryside")-contain rather a lot of padding: "A groom makes a horse more of a horse." Some of it makes little sense, at least to nonperfervid believers with no pretension of being Chosen for Sainthood, particularly Joan's thoughts of "minor modifications of her anatomy" necessary for her to be "less, or with more difficulty," herself: ("Her hands would only have to be turned backward, so that she'd be constrained to invent a new way of praying," or "Her eyes and mouth be set deep in her stomach, so that she'd be unable to put on a helmet." Still, she knew herself, and, what was important, best: "Luckily, with all my horseback rides, I didn't lose my virginity." She acquired, and maintained, and saw that she had, an essential dignity. And she knew what she meant: "When she said voices, moreover, it was merely a figure of speech."

Jeanne Darc might be better heard than read; that would at least obviate the annoyance of different typefaces. It would, however, be insufficient to nullify completely the ill-advisedness of interlining a passage from Macbeth with Quintane's apposite passage on Joan. The author apparently does not realize that we know Shakespeare. Shakespeare is a favorite of ours, and Quintane is no Shakespeare. Her book will probably change no minds. Perhaps, in the end, we each have the Joan of our own imagination, the one we deserve.

Judith L. Greenberg

New York

Jean Rouaud. Pour vos cadeaux. Paris. Minuit. 1998. 187 pages. 85 F. ISBN 2- 7073-1627-X.

Pour vos cadeaux is the fourth novel in what appears to be a series about Jean Rouaud's family. The first, Les champs d'honneur (1990; see WLT 65:3, p. 450), won the Prix Goncourt in 1990 and, along with the second novel, Des hommes illustres (1993; see WLT 69:1, p. 94), has been translated into English by Barbara Wright. This is to say that in eight years' time Rouaud has acquired a minor reputation in both France and the English-speaking world. This fourth novel will undoubtedly add to that reputation, since it is a remarkably engaging work of autobiographical celebration centering on the writer's recently deceased mother.

It is not altogether clear why these works are called novels, for they hardly seem fictional except in the way poetical details are heightened. Rouaud is definitely not part of the "minimalist" group now publishing at the Editions de Minuit, for he eschews the postmodernist techniques characterizing writers as diverse as Toussaint and Deville. Rather, he seems to be writing evocative biography, or, in this case, a mixture of biography and autobiography, since the writer's self is as much in question as is the existence of the mother whom he finds, upon her death, existing in him. One is inevitably reminded of Proust in this regard, and of Claude Simon, though the writing here is grounded-or at least so it strikes most critics-in Rouaud's past and in the history of the region around Nantes where his mother spent her life. Perhaps Rouaud appends the word novel to these texts so as to avoid any accusation that he has taken liberties with truth-though it seems unlikely that anyone is going to bring such a charge against this novel, which creates biography by filtering it through the observing eye of the son who clearly loved his ascetic and sometimes severe mother.

Two deaths frame this series of evocations, one avoided and one real. The first death is the death Rouaud's mother accidentally avoided when, in 1943, she was taken by a cousin to a bomb shelter from a cinema to which she had gone after skipping classes. That afternoon American bombs destroyed the cinema and killed thousands in Nantes. Her death would have meant of course that the writer would never have existed to witness the second death, the real death of his mother coming after years of working in her shop, selling dishes and kitchen appliances, setting up listes de mariage, and being a small commercante for years after her husband had died. The father's unexpected demise was another death that marked the writer, for with his death the mother was left alone to take care of her children and, in a sense, to begin life again, as a shopkeeper whose life turned only upon her children and her commerce. Rouaud conceives of her fate as a destiny. In total acceptance of this destiny, she took her place in the shop as in a universe she would leave only in death: "Elle en est le centre immobile et toujours en mouvement, sorte de quartz vibrant qui donne la mesure du temps." In effect, her destiny is to accept the accidents of death that make her the center and hence the measure of her son's world.

This outline hardly suggests the poetic density of Rouaud's writing here, what he calls, perhaps in despair, "cette non-ecriture d'une non-vie." For his challenge in Pour vos cadeaux is to write these lines that "she will never read," as he says several times, lines that restore the rhythms of an existence lived in the shadows of history, but in harmony with a social ideal that is never named, only lived. Rouaud meets the challenge through style, through the creation of a network of images, metaphors, and descriptions that do restore a few moments of that life. This recall of time past strikes me as a fairly rare accomplishment in contemporary literature.

Allen Thiher

University of Missouri, Columbia

Michel Volkovitch. Transports solitaires. Paris. Nadeau. 1998. 118 pages. 85 F. ISBN 2-86231-146-4.

Featured on the cover of Michel Volkovitch's book is an immense picture advertisement of a gorgeous bikini-clad model affixed to a subway-station wall, under which sits a miserable middle-aged man with his head bowed in his folded arms. The title of this collection of six short stories, Transports solitaires, is suggestive of a lonely yearning for intense passion in an ambience of transportation-a possible play on words, or a pun. The narrator in all six of the stories is a mature "solitaire" whose introverted, rambling thoughts or dreams reveal a keen ability to observe ordinary human beings.

Particularly successful is the author's capturing of the ridiculous behavior of passengers in a Parisian subway who are unaware that they are being watched. The subway is the environment of the first and longest story, "Sans toi sous la terre," which fills half of the book's total pages. The narrator, traveling in a subway train, shares with the reader the pleasure of a cynical portrayal of poor people below ground. He justifies this as "reality," whereas the world of his beloved "dream girl," a Swissair hostess floating high in the skies above him and dealing only with the rich, is corrupt and deformed. The contrast between the two lovers is extreme. They have had conversations together, have enjoyed their companionship, but have never touched. His "transport solitaire" is merely fantasy. The reader will surely delight in the jovial description of a variety of humble passengers and revel in the humor, yet feel sympathy for them. Two brief quotations from "Sans toi sous la terre" exemplify Volkovitch's clever style of writing and the narrator's skill at analyzing human foibles:

Printemps tardif. Deux mecs dans les trente-cinq ans, jeans et veste jean, soigneusement mal rases, cote a cote. L'un dort sur l'epaule de l'autre. Quel plaisir fou ce doit etre, quand le moindre geste en public est interdit.

Comme quoi, si descendre sous terre angoisse les uns . . . d'autres au contraire-pas seulement les fous, mais la plupart des blesses de la vie-semblent y trouver un apaisement.

A review hardly does justice to this book. It is short, clever, humorous, somewhat unusual, well written, and undeniably appealing. Certainly, it must be read to be appreciated.

Alan Roberts

Union College (N.Y.)

Theater

Yasmina Reza. Theatre. Paris. Albin Michel. 1998. 284 pages. 120 F. ISBN 2-226- 08762-1.

---. L'homme du hasard. Paris. Albin Michel. 1998. 65 pages. 59 F. ISBN 2-226- 08761-3.

After having been exposed for decades to the work of great playwrights (Beckett, Genet, Ionesco) and fine ones (Giraudoux, Anouilh, Sarraute), I must note that Yasmina Reza has not yet reached her apogee. Her sense of inner drama, poetry, and time, her flights of fantasy, and, most important, her profound understanding of "the word" have not yet been fully developed. She, like many artists in general, has yet to face the befuddling dilemma: should she write for "the chosen few" or for the masses?

The sometimes witty dialogue of Conversations apres un enterrement (first performed in 1987) dispels whatever tragic overtones may be connected with a parent's death. The children of the deceased father-Nathan, Edith, and Alex-an uncle, Pierre, his wife Julienne, and Elisa, Alex's former mistress, have joined the immediate family in mourning at their country home in the Loiret region. Annoyed because of Elisa's presence at the funeral, Alex, who has not seen her in three years, wishes she would leave. She does. Before doing so, however, she tells Nathan that he, and not Alex, has been and still is the love of her life. She departs. A theatrical ploy, since her car breaks down shortly thereafter. Returning moments later, she takes time out to make love with Nathan. Meanwhile, the womenfolk talk vegetables, cooking, hair styles, and love lives. Nathan, who now offers to drive Elisa to the train station, returns with her shortly thereafter, as was to be expected-in time to partake of a fine dinner!

La traversee de l'hiver (first performed in 1989) reveals growth and greater originality on the playwright's part. The Romanian-born cast of six, intent upon relaxing in a mountain pension in Switzerland, do all but that. As the characters recline on folding chairs in a garden, readers listen to the problematics of their lives: their passion for music, scholarship, creative writing, former and future loves, and, most of all, their need for peace of mind. The ongoing games of Scrabble and bridge played off-stage serve to deepen as well as to heighten the momentum of this increasingly gripping theater piece.

Art (performed in 1994) has earned international success. Deeply influenced by Sarraute's flair for language and her method of burrowing into the inner core of a word and theme, thereby drawing out their multiple meanings, the play revolves around a subject which also seeks to discern motivations. Art focuses on an abstract white-on-white painting purchased by Serge, a successful dermatologist. His friends, Marc and Yvain, taunt him: only if one takes the time to look at his painting carefully-squintingly-may one perhaps discern some thin white transverse lines. Why did he buy it? Was it a way of enhancing his self-esteem, his status? Meanwhile, Serge, feeling attacked, takes umbrage. The vigorously intellectual tussle that ensues activates angry, hateful, loving emotions, thus accentuating the richness and the ambiguities of the personalities involved.

L'homme du hasard (first performed in 1995), consists of inner dialogues-by one male and one female character-seated in the compartment of a moving train. The play's theme-how to learn to deal with but also to profit from life's continually shifting vagaries-is aptly expressed in the statement on the book's flyleaf: "J'aime les voyages. En posant le pied a Francfort, je serai une autre: la personne qui arrive est toujours une autre. D'ailleurs c'est ainsi qu'on va, d'autre en autre, jusdu'a la fin."

Yasmina Reza, already the recipient of fame, has a lifetime ahead of her to create her own unique theatrical adventure!

Bettina L. Knapp

Hunter College & the Graduate Center, CUNY

Verse

Jean Joubert. Anthologie personnelle. Arles, Fr. Actes Sud. 1997 (released 1998). 148 F. ISBN 2-7427-1475-8.

Actes Sud continues its roughly annual series of personal poetry collections (which in the past has included such luminaries as Edouard Maunick and Rene Depestre) with a self-chosen selection of verse by Jean Joubert, who previously has published a great many novels, several volumes of poetry, and many children's books, primarily with Grasset and L'Ecole des Loisirs. Spanning from 1955 to 1997, the poems provide a hearty selection from each of his books of verse and give a glimpse into all the stages of his poetry.

In a self-chosen volume such as Anthologie personnelle, as interesting as the poems themselves, I believe, is the image of the author's changing esthetic that they create. As Joubert suggests in a long and precise introduction, "L'esprit de cette collection implique une subjectivite de l'auteur, si bien que c'est avec mon regard, mon gout actuel que j'ai relu l'ensemble de mes recueils, me sentant parfois presque etranger aux plus anciens." It is a taking stock, an attempt to consider forty years of poetry and to decide what, from the present perspective, should be preserved and what should be abandoned.

In general, the choices are good, illustrating clearly Joubert's development. In the earlier poems, the influence of symbolism and surrealism is sometimes felt. Often, throughout the volume, there are returns to the country as well, to rural imagery and the objects of nature. Thematically, love appears, in many different forms, throughout Joubert's poetry, and if there is a thread that holds this personal collection together, it comes in the often optimistic return to love and the loved one.

Formally, the poems vary a great deal-in this in particular one gets a sense of Joubert's possible range. They stretch from traditional forms to prose poems, from the meandering and quite admirable city poem "La Chambre de Verre" to object-description poems that serve as riddles. Included as well are poems about Emily Dickinson, William Butler Yeats, and other writers.

Though various and perhaps lacking the focus of a single volume of poetry, Anthologie personnelle does provide a clear portrait of Jean Joubert's poetic art. It is a sort of road map of Joubert's work, marking not only where he has been and where he is now, but also suggesting where he will go next.

Brian Evenson

Oklahoma State University

Charles Le Quintrec. Danses et chants pour Elisane. Paris. Albin Michel. 1998. 169 pages. 120 F. ISBN 2-226-10060-1 (09957-3 paper).

Hymns and folk songs, plainchant and prayers, rounds and regional folk dances make up the first part of Charles Le Quintrec's Danses et chants pour Elisane. The collection concludes with a section titled "Sous Ponce Pilate," inspired, the author says, by an altarpiece found at Notre-Dame de la Houssaye (Pontivy).

Many of the poet's texts are set against the backdrop of his native Brittany: its sand, wind, and sea, "le chant / De ceux qui s'enchantent du vent." They are also placed, however, in the in illo tempore of biblical narrative. A sense of the holy pervades the volume, which opens with an epigraph from Saint-Pol Roux: "L'Ecriture est l'enseignement silencieux du Verbe." While Le Quintrec celebrates Elisane as mother, daughter, sister, mistress (and rhymes her name with courtisane), she is more mythical than real, sister to the "eternelle Vierge nee de notre imaginaire."

Le Quintrec traces his inspiration to the Cantique des cantiques and sets his texts into "le temps de la ferveur." Poetry is prayer, he says, asserting that even Andre Breton was "un adorateur qui se cache." The pastoral evocations of his poems, with their frequent emphasis on the word nu (naked), suggest the Garden of Eden. "Je t'ai prise pour un ange," says the singer of Elisane.

Literary references are made to Virgil, Villon, Ronsard, Malherbe, Marot, Alain- Fournier, Hugo, and Baudelaire, but Le Quintrec's most apparent ancestors are Apollinaire (he won the Prix Apollinaire for Jeunesse de Dieu) and Nerval, who, though mentioned by name only once, is heard in several of the poems. (Le Quintrec won the Prix Gerard de Nerval for Les temps obscurs.) "Je ne veux pas mourir avant d'aimer / Disait le prince a la tour abolie," writes Le Quintrec, who also evokes the "princesse / Dans la plus haute tour" and "Le prince fou."

Counterbalanced with the song-and-dance rhythms of Alcools (Le Quintrec even borrows Apollinaire's maclotte) are the more somber notes reminding us that love and death are inextricably linked, not only in the crucifixion of Christ, but in all human relationships. "Je n'avais plus rien que la mort," concludes the "Ode et lumiere 3." Prayerful, but never full of despair, the Danses et chants pour Elisane remind us of both life's delight and the precarious nature of that delight in the hic et nunc of our existence. At the same time, Le Quintrec holds firm to the conviction of a hereafter celebrated in song.

Mechthild Cranston

Clemson University

Essays

Philippe Delerm. La Premiere Gorgee de biere et autres plaisirs minuscules. Paris. Gallimard. l997. 96 pages. 78 F. ISBN 2-07-074483-3.

In a France where le fast-food, weakened family ties, and the complexities of economic globalization have taken root, Philippe Delerm's celebration of pleasures as simple as they are traditional has obviously struck a chord. After one year in circulation, more than three hundred thousand copies of this slim volume have been sold.

In thirty-four short essays the author, a secondary-school teacher and columnist for L'Humanite, evokes renewed appreciation of the commonplace. Delerm succeeds by wedding a remarkable sensitivity to sensory perception with an unmistakable love for the language is all its subtlety. There is something of Proust, for example, in the author's description of a visit to his apple cellar, where a mere whiff of stored fruit conjures up autumns long past and rainy afternoons in classrooms where rows of children practice their penmanship. An association with the annual return to school is sparked by an invitation to pick berries at the end of summer along wooded paths "that smell of school," and friends anticipate transforming the fruit into sorbet and "its icy sweetness where the late summer sun sleeps in cool shadows." The preparation of food as a social ritual figures prominently in a number of these essays, as friends shell peas or peel potatoes for an unplanned pot-luck dinner, and there is a touch of religious import when the author picks out pastries for the family Sunday meal and carries off the carefully boxed eclairs and napoleons like a "monstrance" at vespers. In another piece he uses an impressionist's palette to depict a kitchen garden in late summer, when the sun seems to hover over "all the golds, greens, and rose" of plums, beets, carrots, and beds of lettuce. To be sure, even tradition can suggest less positive associations, as we read in an essay on port wine as a genteel aperitif. For Delerm the sweet ruby-colored liquor smacks of Stendhal's ecclesiastical France, where "red and black . . . and velvet hangings" conceal a hint of violence and "every sip is a lie." A discordant note with a modern ring is struck in a piece where an adult violates many French taboos as he surrenders to "the indecent pleasures . . . of a banana split," and the "sinful" concoction, lovingly evoked, subverts even the most powerful feelings of guilty embarrassment.

Clearly, food, friends, and childhood memories like those of the first pleasant spring day when someone notes that "we could almost eat out of doors" constitute many of Delerm's "minuscule pleasures." And even a reader unfamiliar with the author's world experiences something of his delight as he sets off on a frosty morning before daylight to purchase croissants and a baguette at the corner bakery, all aglow and redolent of fresh bread. But the author also conveys a sense of comfort found in such unlikely situations as treating a head cold under the cover of an inhalation or in listening to the reassuring whirring sound of a friction-powered bicycle light as he pedals homeward at dusk. His love for bicycles figures in a number of these essays, and he finds that an important national bond is forged each summer thanks to the Tour de France, when the whole country gathers by the road to see their favorites speed by. Other modest joys and the insights they afford can be had at the movies, or while reading at the beach, or driving alone at night on a long trip. And Delerm gives fresh meaning to trying on a new sweater on the first chilly day in autumn, when everything seems burnished in "russet and beige," whether it is buttered gingerbread or a basket of forest mushrooms.

Given the fleeting nature of pleasure, Delerm often tempers a satisfying moment with a sense of loss at its passing, and a twinge of apprehension colors even the most spontaneous of delights. There is little doubt that the times threaten leisurely meals prepared with freshly picked vegetables and bread from the local baker. For Delerm, ennui and regret seem inseparable from pleasure, and even an apparently flawless Sunday evening at home is not immune to a sudden "moment of melancholy." The scent of apples, so rich in its associations from childhood, is also described as "painful" in its evocation of a period once lived both "more intensely and with greater leisure than we now deserve." Even the experience of biting into a fresh croissant on a frosty morning is fraught with the foreboding that the moment may be the best the day will have to offer. Delerm's underlying irony is clear in the title essay and its description of the first sip of beer. For the author, the moment is a small miracle that occurs even while it is disappearing, and each successive sip then becomes a pale reminder of what has passed, "a bitter happiness: we drink now to forget the first sip."

Richard A. Preto-Rodas

University of South Florida

Criticism

Jean-Francois Louette. Sartre contra Nietzsche (Les Mouches, Huis clos, Les Mots). Grenoble, Fr. Presses Universitaires de Grenoble. 1996 (released 1997). 192 pages. 98 F. ISBN 2-7061-0712-X.

For some years now, new readings of Sartre have been forthcoming, prompted in large part by the appearance of so many previously unpublished writings of Sartre that have been released since his death in 1980. Jean-Francois Louette's most recent book, Sartre contra Nietzsche, is a very welcome addition to a growing critical corpus that has helped refashion our sense of France's last "contemporain capital." Sartre contra Nietzsche, divided into three sections, offers new readings of two plays, Les mouches (The Flies) and Huis clos (No Exit), as well as Sartre's autobiography, Les mots (The Words), three works that are informed by a dialogue with Nietzsche that is, as Louette freely admits, often only implicit. And yet, teased out by this subtle critic, a largely unspoken dialogue becomes a provocative new lens through which to reevaluate the philosophy and the esthetics of three major works by Sartre that we thought we knew well.

If Nietzsche looms large in Sartre's preoccupations, suggests Louette, it is above all on account of his atheism, not just the logical consequence of the "death of God," but a conviction whose terrible consequences Nietzsche confronted until his death. In Les mots Sartre insists that atheism is "une entreprise cruelle et de longue haleine," adding: "je crois l'avoir menee jusqu'au bout." But Nietzsche's weltanschauung also contains elements that the young Sartre found deeply tempting: the rampant elitism of the Nietzschean Ubermensch, the impulse to self-creation and self-sufficiency, the unrepentant individualism are all traits that find echoes in Sartre's earliest writings until the war and until Sartre's ideological conversion to the notion of "engagement," whose slow maturation develops in direct opposition to Nietzsche's thought.

In the first of the two early plays studied here, Les mouches, Louette traces its protagonist's many Nietzschean attributes: Oreste's willingness to assume his crime and corresponding solitude, his search for joy as a value and corresponding refusal of pity or remorse. He also notes similarities of metaphor, shared obsessions with lightness and gravity, and the Nietzschean topography of the play, but then insists on the element of parody in Sartre's arrangement of these common traits, a crucial dimension containing its own critique, both of Nietzsche and of Oreste, whom Louette treats here not as a model hero but as a compelling if problematic stage in Sartre's now tenuous relationship to Nietzsche.

And yet, suggests Louette, Nietzsche still haunts Sartre's most famous play, Huis clos, an anti-Christian "machine de guerre," in which Sartre uses elements of naturalist and boulevard theater to undermine basic Christian tenets and turn Christianity's conception of hell into a vast joke that nobody could possibly take seriously. By replacing the horror of damnation with an esthetics of embarrassment, Sartre not only stripped any Petainiste spectator of his metaphysical props, but also forced him into the uncomfortable position of being both the source and the object of diabolical laughter.

Les mots recounts the emergence of a writer whose conception of writing and ethics have evolved in opposition to Nietzsche's legacy. By putting an earlier, elitist notion of the writer on trial, Sartre weaves into his purported autobiography an oblique perspective on Sartre's political conversion whose postwar articulation marked the end of Nietzsche's influence. This conclusion to Louette's stimulating book has the additional merit of complementing his close textual readings with a more general sense of Sartre's ethical evolution, by bringing into sharper focus what one might term his "archeology of values" from the twenties to the sixties.

John Ireland

University of Illinois, Chicago

Biography

Christophe Bident. Maurice Blanchot: Partenaire invisible. Seyssel, Fr. Champ Vallon. 1998. 640 pages. 210 F. ISBN 2-87673-253-X.

The hidden side of Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907) has always been intriguing. There are only a couple of photographs of him that have been published because of his reluctance to appear before a camera. Christophe Bident promises to reveal that hidden side with this pave, a cobblestone-size book which recalls the biography that Michel Surya wrote for Blanchot's intellectual colleague Georges Bataille (Georges Bataille, la mort a l'ouvre, 1992). Despite citing Surya plentifully, Bident is no Surya. He provides no careful historical outline of Blanchot's life, works, and events as Surya outlines for Bataille. Nor do we have any of the existing photographs of Blanchot which would have provided a much-needed visual presence to Blanchot, as Surya did for Bataille.

Bident does provide many insights into the complex history of Blanchot, who is still alive at the time of this writing. In July 1998, Blanchot had a letter published on the front page of La Quinzaine Litteraire opposing the anti- Semitism of a member of the National Front who was published in the same press that had published some of Blanchot's recent works, Fata Morgana in Montpellier. Certainly, his subject has been outspoken against anti-Semitism, especially since Jeffrey Mehlman's Legacies of Anti-Semitism in France (1983), which identified Blanchot's right-wing affiliations in the 1930s as contributing to the terrors of fascism in Europe.

Bident's "biographical essay" (as he subtitles this work) is a careful study which helps us make more distinctions today among the right-wing factions of 1930s Europe. Blanchot was at the very center of a vortex in which fascist, anti-Semitic, royalist, aristocratic, nationalist, and of course Nazi interests were coalescing into the nightmarish program for the Holocaust. Blanchot's correspondence constitutes the main source of new information from which Bident exposes the network of friendships and political alliances of Blanchot. Bident does not judge Blanchot's aristocratic and right-wing affiliations but instead exposes the tendencies of his subject to prefer order to freedom, a carefully controlled revolt to end the abuses of a nationalism which was itself out of control, and a politics of disengagement (Blanchot's degagement). There is also a fascinating itinerary of Blanchot's friendships with Emanuel Levinas, Georges Bataille, Robert Antelme, Dionys Mascolo, and Marguerite Duras, among other intellectuals of the twentieth century whom he has influenced and who have influenced him in ways that have yet to be developed in their political, literary, and philosophical dimensions.

Blanchot's prose and his critical works are so well interwoven into Bident's biography that we sense that Bident has closely read Blanchot's published work. The bibliography is also very helpful in that essays which in some cases were not signed but nevertheless can be attributed to Blanchot for reasons given by Bident provide access to Blanchot's prolific writings about many diverse authors from cultures throughout the world.

Roland A. Champagne

University of Missouri, St. Louis

Diary

Jacques Reda. Le citadin. Paris. Gallimard. 1998. 231 pages. 115 F. ISBN 2-07- 075186-4.

In recent years there have been numerous investigations of the subject of Poetry: what is Poetry, in fact, and is Poetry in danger of disappearing as a bona fide literary form? Responses from poets to these eternal questions have raised more questions, and reminded us that Poetry has always been a genre under siege, complicit in its own habitation of everything marginal.

Jacques Reda presses forward in Le citadin, a kind of chronicle of the poet's selected peregrinations throughout Paris and its extended metropolitan environs, offering the reader the occasional comment on the nature of the city, its inhabitants, and the relations between them still capable of sustaining poetry, whatever that may be: "C'est ca la poesie, celle des gens. Ils plantent, cultivent, bricolent, construissent, tant bien que mal et par pure necessite de survivre et de se ressaisir."

If Reda worries that the relationship is a precarious one, his predilection for jazz, which we have seen in his numerous previous volumes, leaves him open to improvisation and a future filled with an as yet uninvented French language resonant with the needs and the desires of its new speaking public: "On dirait qu'ils emploient faute de mieux [la morphologie et la syntaxe] du francais, pour suivre les lois d'un langage qui n'existe encore qu'a l'etat pure de donnee rythmique."

Reminiscent of Apollinaire's "Zone" and the dual necessities of his technique- method and adventure-Reda sets out on these excursions with several guiding principles, which easily give way when curiosity proves irrepressible and the poet abandons himself to chance.

Le citadin is organized into four cycles that follow the passing seasons- "Automne," "Hiver," "Printemps," "Ete"-plus a kind of coda ("Hors saisons") made up of vignettes particularly attentive to silence, words, and music. Reda also includes a table of the principal arrondissements that his texts explore. A keenly perceptive walker's guide to Paris, Le citadin probes the limits of the city, its language, and its uncanniness.

Maryann De Julio

Kent State University

Memoirs

Jorge Semprun. Adieu, vive clarte... Paris. Gallimard. 1998. 253 pages. 120 F. ISBN 2-07-075178-3.

Jorge Semprun (b. 1923), son of a diplomat-member of the Spanish Popular Front, spent the early years of his boyhood in The Hague, where his father was posted. The family fled to exile in France when Franco took Madrid in March 1939, sharing the pain and the sorrow of the tens of thousands of refugees like themselves, a theme to which Semprun constantly recurs. The Sempruns fortunately had friends in France, like the American Gouverneur Paulding, who offered them shelter, and the Catholic Liberal group "Esprit." The young Jorge was enrolled in the Lycee Henri IV, where, in spite of initial linguistic difficulties, he was recognized as an excellent student and where he fell in love with Paris and French literature.

Semprun became an active communist and joined the French Resistance in 1942. But he was soon captured by the Gestapo and deported to Buchenwald, from which, at the end of the war, he emerged alive, not yet twenty-two years old. He speaks only in passing of Buchenwald in Adieu. However, he recalls the horrors of the concentration camps in several of his novels, such as Le grand voyage (1963) and Quel beau dimanche (1981). Adieu rather seeks to bring back memories "de la decouverte de l'adolescence et de l'exil." This multilayered, complex, deliberately (?) random text ranges from boyhood memories to commentaries on the violence of the period, the rise of Nazism, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and (very important) remarks about "historicity," a major intellectual preoccupation of Semprun's, encouraged by his readings of Hegel, J. L. Landsberg, and Walter Benjamin. He dwells particularly on the ambiguous relationship between personal memory and historical fact and on "l'univers confus, imprevisible, et fabuleux de l'histoire."

After the war, Semprun collaborated with the filmmaker Alain Resnais, for whom he wrote the screenplays for La guerre est finie (1965) and Stavisky (1974), both of which reveal a growing disenchantment with communism that was also evident in the autobiographical novel (in Spanish) L'autobiografia de Federico Sanchez (1978). In recognition of his literary achievements, he was elected to the Academie Goncourt. In spite of his success in Paris, however, he returned to Spain, where he had been named Minister of Culture in the Socialist government. (He never forgot his Basque and Spanish roots!) Still, he had long found joy during his life in Paris and in coming to know French literature and the French language. His memories of his strolls around his favorite neighborhoods on the Left Bank stand out as among the most lyrical passages in the volume. Baudelaire, who introduced him to the beauties of the French language, was also his guide in exploring the city of his dreams, with "a Baedeker in one hand, Les Fleurs du mal in the other." After Baudelaire came Rimbaud, "a dazzling revelation." He was also devouring novels-Malraux, Gide, Proust, Louis Guilloux. As a foreigner and a refugee, he loved these authors "who didn't demand a passport to open their pages to him." His passion for literature made him an excellent student, and in 1941 he received the Prix de Philosophie in the Concours general. But his scholarly career was interrupted by his deportation to Buchenwald.

On his return from captivity, Semprun decided to become a militant communist. He joined a clandestine anti-Franco group and was sent on several missions to Spain "that had nothing to do with this book" and which he passes over in silence. By the 1960s he had lost faith in communism, now arguing that a parliamentary monarchy is the best form of government for Spain. Semprun clearly has a greater passion for literature and history than he has for women. He makes only a few, very brief mentions of sexual encounters. However, he treats in some detail an erotic incident which took place at a formal dinner party, where he was seated next to the hostess, the middle-aged, inflammable spouse of a rich arms dealer. She puts her hand on his knee, then proceeds to fondle his fly. He reciprocates by stroking her thighs, while the serious businessmen around them speak of making a pile in the expanding arms market. But nothing ever comes of this under-the-table dalliance, and in the very next paragraph he returns, without transition, to political matters: "Hitler was about to invade Poland." This rejection of narrative cohesion persists throughout the entire volume. It also throws light on the author's ideas of "historicity." Barthes, Landsberg, and Benjamin "had opened his eyes to the confused, unpredictable, and fabulous universe of history." He concludes these memoirs of his boyhood, of the pain and isolation of exile, of the political tumult of the 1930s and 1940s with the citation of several lines from Baudelaire "which have haunted me as I wrote this book": "Adieu, vive clarte, de nos etes trop courts."

John L Brown

Washington, D.C.

Foreign Criticism

David Gascoigne. Michel Tournier. Oxford, Eng. Berg. 1996 (released 1997). xii + 234 pages. [pound]44.95 ([pound]17.95 paper). ISBN 1-85973-024-8 (084-1 paper).

David Gascoigne offers us a very useful and rewarding introduction to the work of Michel Tournier, comprehensively researched, well organized, and written in clear, focused prose. Over the last two decades the critical attention devoted to Tournier has been quite substantial, as befits one of France's most prominent and certainly most idiosyncratic novelists. Gascoigne's book clarifies and justifies that attention while setting out the central issues of Tournier's varied output to date. Rather than proceeding chronologically, these issues are explored in something like a thematic vein, although, given the attention paid to structure and composition, it would be truer to say that Gascoigne is less interested in themes as such than in what he sees as the primary "fields of force" shaping Tournier's creative imagination.

In detailed, comprehensively researched chapters, Gascoigne presents Tournier's interest in nonliterary phenomena such as numerology, astrology, and musicology to structure his writing. He notes that Tournier is a rebel but that his quarrel with Western society is cultural rather than political and begins with childhood and the education of children. Gascoigne persuasively links Tournier's fascination with children to their energy, curiosity, and creativity and the fact that no natural boundary separates their sensual, sexual, and intellectual discoveries before adults impose their crippling taboos. Tournier's interest in nonprocreative sexuality and particularly homosexuality is also, suggests Gascoigne, part of the same campaign against what he sees as the stifling emptiness of adult maturity and marriage-based sexual conformity. It is significant that the vibrant and stimulating discoveries that dazzle the reader of Vendredi, Le roi des aulnes, and Les meteores take place in settings dominated by men and male children.

To his credit, Gascoigne does not shy away from the disturbing elements of Tournier's fascination with children, the pedophilia evident in both Le roi des aulnes and more particularly Gilles, an account of Gilles de Rais which attempts to understand a mass murderer of children. Although Tournier is clear in depicting atrocities that he obviously condemns, he also seems fascinated by the possibility of redemption for Gilles, whatever his crimes may have been. In that sense, suggests Gascoigne, Tournier's perspective of Gilles is bound up with an idiosyncratic but deeply involved reading of Christian theology and biblical scripture that Gascoigne details in another absorbing chapter.

The last chapter of Gascoigne's book helps clarify what is perhaps the central thrust of his argument: Tournier the short-story writer and novelist is above all a storyteller. And that is why, suggests Gascoigne, despite the precise settings of novels such as Le roi des aulnes and Les meteores, Tournier is fundamentally hostile to history and its determinisms, preferring a symbolic account of events that displaces the normal causal logic of historiography. In Tournier's literary universe, history is systematically annexed by myth: his stories seek their truths in another, timeless dimension, a poetic construction transcending the limits of historical "realist" fiction that has rarely been hospitable to sensibilities such as his. It is in this larger, cosmic context, concludes Gascoigne, that Tournier the master storyteller achieves the most resonant moments of his writing.

John Ireland

University of Illinois, Chicago

Noted

Christine Spianti. Comme ils vivent. Paris. Nadeau. 1998. 127 pages. 98 F. ISBN 2-86231-144-8.

Perhaps it's a painfully thin slice of life, or a far too long purely superficial tracking shot of "how they live." Perhaps it's a descent into Hell, with farfetched echoes of the Inferno, but closer approximations of a homeless shelter or encampment, in a multilevel enclosed parking garage, the abode of those of no fixed abode, foreigners, strays, strangers, marginalia of varied nationalities, a group of down-and-outs, "down so long" (to mix decades and genres) "it looks like up to [them]," characters indistinguishable except, sometimes, by name, even including Murder (of no clearly apparent nationality).

Perhaps it's a report of an inquiry or investigation gone out of control. Perhaps it's a sketch for a dreary film. Perhaps it's a dream, or a nightmare. And perhaps it's a hallucinatory love story-or one of a love lost and then found and ending in a sun-drenched garden (= death? = life?). In search of love, the narrator is led through the parking garage, where "one might look for God and succeed in finding him," by a leather-clad "Angel." Maybe, just maybe, you had to be there. Otherwise, frankly, Scarlett

Judith L. Greenberg

New York

Daniel Pigeon. La proie des autres. Montreal. XYZ. 1998. 188 pages. Can$19.95. ISBN 2-89261-220-9.

Daniel Pigeon, a Canadian author better known for his short stories, opens the novel La proie des autres with the first-person narrative of fifteen-year-old Sophie in the throes of a masturbatory orgasm. Through the judicious use of italics to juxtapose the present with the past, Montreal with Rio de Janeiro, the novel follows the adolescent's descent into nightmare, patricide, and eventual insanity.

Through sessions with a psychiatrist, readers soon discover that over the years Sophie's father has had incestuous relations with her ("ma petite femme"); furthermore, while in Rio, she may have drunk cachaca and been sexually sacrificed to Echou, the Afro-Brazilian god, during a particularly violent macumba possession. Her only protection against both her father and Echou has been a blessed amulet. When the asylum staff take it away, she can only sink deeper into self-destruction.

Whether she hoped to escape the reality of incest and, ultimately, increasingly terrifying madness through orgiastic conduct (real or imagined) is a question which the author correctly never answers. All that remains for her to do, therefore, is to summon and follow her Brazilian guide "loin d'ici," as she bursts into laughter in her securely padded room.

In exploring the devastation caused by incest as well as the victim's defense mechanisms, Pigeon has written a timely novel in a style reminiscent of Latin American magic realism.

Pierre L. Horn

Wright State University