European Literary Immigration into the French Language: Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun (review)

This examination of the effects on a novelist of immigration into a new language and a new culture offers valuable insights into the work of many authors who have adopted French as their medium of literary expression. The four chapters of the book deal with the implications of migrating to a second language and with a series of related themes found in some or all of the writers on whom the book is focussed. Chapter 1 offers an informed and wide-ranging consideration of the effects of migration on writers, using linguistic research, psychoanalytical theories and the experiences of many literary immigrants into French, from Beckett to Todorov. Topics examined include the link between abandonment of the mother tongue and increased creative capacity, the sense of betrayal associated with abandoning one’s first language, the pain of the period of transition, the problem of identity, the loss of the myth of home and the consequences for form and style. Chapter 2, focussed on Semprun and Gary, deals with the significance of the ideal of Europe, as embodied in French cultural tradition, for immigrants whose national identity has been abandoned. This ideal is cultural rather than political and it is a source of disappointment and despair as well as hope, but, for Miletic, it provides the writers examined with the strongest statement of identity in their writing. Chapter 3 examines the themes of utopianism and freedom in the writing of Semprun and Kundera, arguing that those who are uprooted are particularly attracted by the vision of belonging to an imaginary utopian community of which freedom, in various forms, is an essential element. Chapter 4 develops themes of doubling and incest, primarily in relation to Kristof, but also in the works of Semprun, and to a lesser extent in those of Gary and Kundera, and argues that they mirror the loss and doubling of identity experienced by those who adopt a second language and culture. This is a stimulating book, teasing out the implications of an aspect of the lives of these writers which has too often remained secondary in studies of their novels. Such a wide-ranging approach inevitably gives rise to some questions. Miletic repeatedly asserts the existence of a particularly French view of European culture, but this view is assumed and not defined, nor is it distinguished from other European views of Europe. Some of the minor themes could not always be fully exploited, for example the figure of the picaro is discussed in Chapter 3 in relation to Semprun, but Gary, in whose writing the picaro is a crucial figure, is relegated to a footnote on page 177. Finally, the book attempts to present a full examination of its subject and to avoid reductionism. This produces a form involving a series of discussions of related issues, divided into a large number of subheadings and short sections. These were at times unhelpful, impeding rather than assisting the flow of the argument in this interesting and perceptive study.