Mon ancêtre Poisson by Christine Montalbetti (review)

If we cared to go back far enough—say, for the sake of argument, 375 million years or so—all of us would find fish in our family tree. Christine Montalbetti finds her own fish on a more proximal branch, in the person of her great-great-grandfather, one Jules Poisson. Born in 1833, he began his working life at the age of nine as a gardener in the Jardin des Plantes, in Paris. By dint of hard work, a very lively intellect, and an insatiable sense of curiosity, he would eventually become a distinguished and broadly published botanist. He died in 1919, having witnessed what was notionally to be the war to end all wars. Montalbetti mentions that Jules Poisson is the most distant of her ancestors whom she can identify, and one of her projects in this book is to abolish, insofar as possible, the ages that separate them. She addresses him directly here, as if she were sitting at his knee, and she senses that his life contains a rich vein of narrative: "Ta vie, Jules, c'est avant tout une série de petits romans, et d'abord les romans que les uns et les autres, dans la famille, on s'est faits a ton sujet. […] Un roman troué, bien sûr, un roman lacunaire" (9). That strategy of address places we readers in a curious position, listening in as it were to a virtual, one-sided conversation between Montalbetti and the forefather whom she seeks to know. Yet Montalbetti herself occupies a position that is in some ways similar, as she engages in a kind of archeology intended to render her ancestor more familiar, reading the scholarly articles that he himself must have read, savoring this polymath's itinerary: "Je lis par-dessus ton épaule, tiens, quelque chose sur l'usage militaire des pigeons voyageurs, et je me plonge avec toi dans ces histoires de volatiles auxquels on confie des missions d'État" (215). She also reads the articles that he wrote, of course, including the last one, on worms, wherein she sees a pleasing and trenchant black humor. Montalbetti characterizes reading—both hers and ours—as a "fête bizarre" (168). Upon reflection, she realizes that writing could be described in the same way, for both reading and writing can conjure worlds. Since the beginning of her career, Montalbetti has insisted upon the affinities that the fundamental gestures of writing and reading display, and her books have consistently put on offer a rare and very refreshing hospitality. Mon ancêtre Poisson is perhaps her most generous book to date, from its first pages, in which Montalbetti limns her project, to its final ones, wherein the sense of that project comes into focus in a manner that is deeply moving.