In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990
  • Fevronia Novac
Warren Motte . Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2003. 242 pp.

In Fables of the Novel: French Fiction since 1990, Warren Motte chooses to review, in chronological order of their publication, 10 French novels of the 90s he believes are avant-garde novels. The critic claims that all these diverse books are linked by a common preoccupation with telling the "fable" of the novel.

Motte avows from the outset that he has a difficult choice to make in selecting the novels to discuss. He rejects with irony a number of authors who are recipients of prestigious prizes such as the Gouncourt, and he amalgamates them all (Dominique Fernandez, one of the most talented and most erudite novelists alive included) under a comment he bases on his own culinary taste: "I find their works too bland, like eating fried eggs without salt" (4).

Reading Motte's interpretation of these books, one gets the impression that the contemporary French novel recycles old techniques and asks self-evident questions literature has always grappled with. The book lacks a theoretical discussion of the specular techniques employed by the authors Motte engages with as well as any reflection on the status of the contemporary novel in France or the diversity and complexity of historical and political issues recent French novels tackle. Motte does review Linda Lê's Calomnies insisting on the "metatextual" qualities of Lê's discourse, but avoiding to enter a more subversive territory, i. e., the postcolonial implications of the two protagonists' shattered cultural identities.

The subtitle of the book, French Fiction since 1990, is rather misleading since this seems to be a collection of book reviews with no effort to make a coherent argument about why they should be read together. In reality, the French novel since 1990 presents a more refined and sophisticated picture. New Novelists of the 60s, such as Le Clezio (discussed here) or Robbe-Grillet, continue to publish, while "newer" major authors who published in the nineties (such as Christian Bobin, François Cheng, Camille Laurens) managed to attract, just like the novelists selected by Motte, a great deal of attention, but are not included in the critic's picture of the contemporary novel in France.

Motte starts by exploring reading and writing as a journey to discover otherness and the exotic in Le Clezio's Onithsa (1991). Éric Chévillard's La Nébuleuse du crabe (1993) inspires Motte to comment on the performativity of this Beckettian text but without noticing the obvious clin d'oeil to the author of the abject. The critic goes on to point out the hilarious effects of reading in Éric Laurrent's Coup de foudre (1995) where Chester, a schlemiel figure, absorbed in his reading, "will succeed only in falling into the Canal St. Martin" (90). Motte sees Laurrent's book, like most of the novels reviewed, as a statement on the increase marginality and eccentricity of the novel (95).

Very pedagogical, Motte's approach stretches at times the reading to show that all the novels he cites are about the fate of the contemporary novel as narrative and cultural device. He "reads into" Marie NDiaye's La Sorcière (1996), a novel of social critique, where a sad witch's magic provokes more than solves problems, to claim that the novel is about the fate of literature. While NDiaye's novel demystifies common perceptions of magic, Motte thinks he found the hidden references to the "literary alchemy of this novel" (130). He does avow [End Page 365] that metatextuality is not obvious in this novel but thinks himself capable, in an ironic reading of the book, of "rendering it manifest" through sorcery (131).

Motte also reviews Echenoz, the most accomplished contemporary French writer, in whose novel, Un An (1997), the critic sees the narrative discourse shaping itself on the protagonist's adventures: "As Victoire becomes more and more impoverished, so too does her story, which Echenoz strips of description, interpretation, and commentary" (141). The critic reads Christian Oster's Le Pique-nique (1997) as a mise-en-abîme of the...

pdf

Share