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  • Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader by Alexandra Kurmann
  • Gloria Kwok
Kurmann, Alexandra. Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader. Lexington Books, 2016. Pp 228. ISBN 978-1-4985-1486-6. $85 (Hardcover). ISBN 978-1-4985-1487-3. $80 (eBook).

To date, Alexandra Kurmann’s book Intertextual Weaving in the Work of Linda Lê: Imagining the Ideal Reader is the second book-length study on Linda Lê, the first being Linda Lê: L’écriture du manque by Michèle Bacholle-Bošković (2006). While most scholars focus primarily on the recurrent themes of guilt, exile, mourning and paternal loss, only a handful (Winston, Barnes, Bacholle-Bošković, Huston) have pointed out the intertextuality in Lê’s work. Kurmann is, however, the first to unpack the intertextual relationship between Ingebord Bachmann, the Austrian-born writer-in-exile (1926–1973), and Linda Lê (1963), the most prolific French author of Vietnamese origins who lives in Paris.

Intertextual Weaving is divided into five chapters framed by an introduction and a conclusion. In the introduction, the author sets out to define, as the title denotes, the two key concepts in the book—“intertextuality” and “reader.” The [End Page 187] author defines “intertextuality” as conceived by Kristeva as “a web of exchanges taking place on the level of the text in a dialogue maintained between the writing subject and the addressee, the character, or other narratives” (7). Using Kristeva again, the author conceives the reader as the addressee who is “a character to whom the speech is directed” (18). The author contends that Lê is engaged in an intertextual dialogue with Bachmann, her reader and addressee, in both Lê’s fiction and nonfiction. Chapter 1 traces the affinities between the life and work of Lê and Bachmann and their “exilic intersections” (25) that lead Lê to develop an intertextual relationship with the latter. Chapter 2 looks at how Lê appropriates Bachmann’s post-war contemporaries (Giuseppe Ungaretti, Max Frisch, Thomas Bernhard, Philippe Jaccottet, Heinrich Böll) and weaves their quotations on Bachmann in her earliest essays—“Ingebord Bachmann: un brasier d’énigmes” (1989) and “J’écris sur la nature du feu” (1991), reprinted as “Ingebord Bachmann” (1999).

Chapters 3 and 4 show how Lê uses Bachmann’s novel Malina (1971) as the hypotext (source text) for her trilogy consisting of Les trois Parques, Voix: Une crise and Lettre morte (1997–1999). The author cleverly shows how each of Lê’s three novels becomes a transformation of each of the three chapters in Malina. In Lê’s Parques, Voix and Lettre Morte and Bachmann’s Malina, the plot centers on the doomed relationship between a woman and two men. Lê dialogues with Bachmann through the use of myth and the reworking of a Vietnamese legend in Parques and a German myth in the first chapter in Malina. Nightmarish sequences in the psychiatric ward in Voix evoke dream sequences of the woman’s imagined deaths at the hands of Nazi executioners in the second chapter in Malina. The epistolic narrative of Lettre morte is an imitative transformation of the letter fragments in the last chapter of Malina.

Chapter 5 traces how Lê re-reads and transforms Bachmann into an Antigonean figure of female resistance in her fiction and essays. Bachmann, the addressee, becomes the character of Sola in Lê’s novel Les aubes (2000). Like Bachmann herself, Sola died in a fire caused by a cigarette she had forgotten to put out before falling asleep. Lê sees Bachmann and Sola’s death not as suicide but as signs of protest against the unjust patriarchal society.

In the conclusion, the author reiterates that Lê—the writing subject and also a reader—writes dialogically back to Bachmann—her reader and addressee—as she weaves Bachmann’s life and work into her essays and then recycles them back in her fiction. This intertextual relationship allows Lê to belong to the community of post-war exiled writers and express the universal in her work. Kurmann’s study is very well-researched which is not surprising. Intertextual Weaving provides a valuable addition to the extant scholarship on L...

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