Marie Cardinal: New Perspectives (review)

Prompted by the death of Marie Cardinal in May 2001, this collection of essays, with contributions in both English and French, started life as a 'retrospective' international conference held at the University of Sheffield in January 2003. Cardinal was born in Algeria in 1929 and as an adult lived in both France and Quebec. Her œuvre extends across nearly forty years, from her first novel published in 1962 to her last in 1998. To date, only three book-length studies have been devoted to Cardinal's work, and this current appreciation is timely. Understandably, many of the contributors to the volume focus on best-seller Les Mots pour le dire (1975), but, between them, the contents cover almost the full extent of Cardinal's work: with Phil Powrie analysing as an intertextual group Cardinal's appearance in Bresson's film Mouchette, her journal of the making of that film, Cet été-là (1966), and the later Les Mots pour le dire; Patricia de Méo discussing Le Passé empiété (1983) in relation to guilt; Emma Webb analysing the technique of dialogue in Comme si de rien n'était (1990); and several contributors referring to Cardinal's last novel Amour. . . Amours. . . (1998). Kathryn Robson's characteristically excellent chapter posits La Souricière (1965) as a precursor text that opens up new insights into the bodily symptoms manifested by the narrator of Les Mots pour le dire. Colette Hall's important chapter on Cardinal's literary legacy, which identifies how some of her main themes reappear as key concerns in recent women's writing, also usefully surveys the different kinds of reception her texts have received. In France, the author was considered as a 'popular' writer, and for this reason, throughout her career, she was largely scorned by the French literary and academic establishments. Anglophone scholars, however, have deemed Cardinal's work worthy of scholarly attention, especially for her themes relating to women's lives and experiences. More recently, the rise of postcolonial studies and trauma studies in the academe has fostered a new interest in her writing, dealing as it does with issues of colonialism, loss and exile. Thus, several contributors group Cardinal together with other authors: Owen Heathcote studies gender and violence in the Algerian situation in texts by Cardinal, Assia Djebar and Hélène Cixous, and Alison Rice considers the relationship between mother and motherland in the work of the same three writers. In a different optic, Nancy Lane compares Beauvoir's treatment of the body with that in Cardinal's Au pays de mes racines (1980), while Elaine Martin looks at Cardinal alongside other best-selling writers from Germany and Japan. The contents vary in quality and length and the volume would have undoubtedly benefited from stronger editing. Some typographical errors and style and bibliographical inconsistencies mar the presentation, not least the glaring error in Cardinal's year of death in the very first line of the Introduction. None the less, this is a useful collection of perspectives on a writer whose work continues to feature on a range of university courses and to attract the interest of both students and researchers.