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Nue par Jean-Philippe Toussaint

2014; American Association of Teachers of French; Volume: 88; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tfr.2014.0194

2329-7131

Warren Motte,

Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis

Reviews 279 mœurs dépravés, jouets de la nécessité de paraître et des manigances de l’Église ou de leurs favoris. Mais la brillante solution du régent tournera à l’échec. Marie Anne Victoire de Bourbon ne deviendra pas infante-reine de France et Luisa Isabel de Orléans ne sera reine d’Espagne que peu de temps. En 1725, elles repasseront la Bidassoa en sens inverse. D’une écriture élégante, empreinte d’ironie, Thomas nous livre une histoire fascinante propice à la réflexion sur les abus multiples du pouvoir. Fairfield University (CT) Marie-Agnès Sourieau Toussaint, Jean-Philippe. Nue. Paris: Minuit, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7073-2305-7. Pp. 170. 14,50 a. This novel is the fourth and final installment in the“Marie Madeleine Marguerite de Montalte” cycle, following upon Faire l’amour (2002), Fuir (2005), and La vérité sur Marie (2009). Readers of those books will recall that Marie is a fashion designer of international renown. The opening passage of Nue focuses on her latest and boldest collection yet, which along with its magnificent gowns proposes a meditation on the very idea of high fashion. Its pièce de résistance is a seventeen-year-old Russian model ‘dressed’only in a thin coat of honey, and followed on the catwalk by a swarm of bees. When that stunning moment goes awry (as indeed it must), the narrator takes the opportunity to reflect on the curiously symbiotic relation of perfection and chance in art. He thinks also about how Marie makes her way through the world, seeking perfection but nevertheless welcoming chance. Simply, naively, in harmony with her surroundings,“elle semblait toujours déambuler comme nue à la surface du monde” (39). Yet is she any more naked than the narrator himself? He seems to be stripped of his last illusions here, and he puts his obsessions, his jealousy, and his narcissism on display for all to see. Those traits are abundantly apparent as he wonders to what degree his personal Marie coincides with the real Marie. That question points toward an issue that is fundamental in this novel, the vexed relations between fictional worlds and the phenomenal world. The narrator grapples unequally with what he calls “ce réel ankylosé,” realizing that his grapplings serve to limn “un monde idéal, façonné à ma main, peuplé de chimères et parsemé de paysages mentaux éclairés par mes soins” (59). One of those landscapes is particularly arresting. It is located on the island of Elba, and thus necessarily evokes the idea of exile; it is perfumed by the still-smoking ruins of a chocolate factory that an arsonist may have visited; it is set in a cemetery that seems an utterly fitting stage on which to perform a drama of the end of things. Marie and the narrator visit that cemetery on All Saints’ Day—la Toussaint, of course—and become lost therein among the recently-flowered graves. Narrative truth explodes there in astonishing fashion however, and along with it a truth about narrative:“Je me rendis compte alors que tout ce que je vivais d’important dans ma vie était toujours transformé en images dans mon esprit” (154). More than anything else, that is what is at stake in this novel, the naked transformation of the real into the fictional. JeanPhilippe Toussaint lays that gesture bare very deftly, inviting us to savor the ironies and the contradictions that attend it, and hoping to persuade us that imagination is our most powerful tool for coming to terms (however provisional they may be) with the real. University of Colorado Warren Motte Trouillot, Évelyne. Absences sans frontières. Montpellier: Chèvre feuille étoilée, 2013. ISBN 978-2-36795-003-7. Pp. 252. 15 a. En dépit de ce que semble signifier au premier coup d’œil ce titre, la vie de chacun des personnages s’avère du moins en partie définie, voire délimitée par l’existence des frontières.Ainsi Géraldine, enfant unique née au début des années 1990, se remémoret -elle l’élection de Jean-Bertrand Aristide et, plus pr...