André Maurois (1885-1967): Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Moderate by Lionel Gossman (review)

Reviews 233 through their main female characters. Sexual and familial relationships of submission to the mother/father allegorize the true power dynamics at play. Chapter 2 examines images of disease, contamination, indigestion, and regurgitation in the works of Danticat, Levy, and Pineau who foreground misplaced fear of subversion of the values of the dominant host country by the unappetizing unassimilable other. Collen’s efforts to dispel the myth of Mauritius as a tourist gustatory paradise is the focus of the third chapter, while chapter four allegorizes writing in Indian Ocean texts of Agénor and Humbert as a pirating activity that mimics cannibalism since those who write island histories control the narrative for public consumption. This last chapter provides useful historical and geopolitical context for current problems in the region, helping the reader to comprehend the fictional representations of the interplay of allegorized cannibals and the cannibalized. Githire’s book offers an impressive mixture of scholarly supporting materials, careful and thorough close textual analyses, and insertion of helpful historical and geopolitical information to guide readers unfamiliar with the regions in question. Githire’s study, and particular focus on women writers of island regions, is an important and well-researched addition to ongoing discussions among scholars of the proliferation of food imagery in postcolonial women’s writings. Since the texts under scrutiny are a mix of French and English, the study serves to provide a global context for scholars and students exploring postcolonial power relationships through metaphors of eating, being consumed, and refusing or expelling food. Gilthire’s book is interesting, insightful, and eminently readable. Rider University (NJ) Mary L. Poteau-Tralie Gossman,Lionel.André Maurois (1885–1967): Fortunes and Misfortunes of a Moderate. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. ISBN 978-1-137-40271-4. Pp. x + 123. $55. Gossman’s concise intellectual biography of Maurois, whose once famous name and influence have fallen into virtual oblivion, set me to musing on the changes in literary studies that have led to the nearly total break between an educated reading public and our profession as critics and university teachers. The series of pioneering theoretical approaches, from Structuralism and Phenomenology to Deconstructionism and Cultural Studies, have made Maurois’s uncontroversial, engagingly written style of narration irrelevant and even suspect to readers trained to look for the complex ways rhetoric may subvert or disguise buried, often ideologically charged, significance. His prodigious output of more than fifteen biographies (Disraeli, Shelley, Byron, Sand, Turgenev, Chateaubriand, Proust, Balzac, amongst others), ten novels, essays on and prefaces to contemporary fiction, countless journalistic articles and reviews, translations, and histories, published in a sixteen-volume Œuvres complètes by Fayard ten years before his death in 1967, has all but disappeared from current dictionaries of French literature. Besides providing an eye-opening account of Maurois’s impressive accomplishment, this sympathetically written study brings to light the complex historical and cultural climate of the entre-deux-guerres period and explains why a man of Maurois’s innately moderate temperament might become “the very incarnation of the Entente cordiale” (95) before World War II. His aversion to “risk and ‘extremes’—the basis of his appeal to a relatively privileged but threatened educated public—may be a cause of his failure to speak to those born later into an age that no longer sets great store by ‘civility’” (109). In a sense Gossman, whose teaching career began at Johns Hopkins in the late 1950s, did not choose Maurois, but was chosen by him when the curator of Special Collections at Princeton University asked him to write an article for their library Chronicle on an amusing memoir Maurois had written for French readers about his experience of precepting a course for Princeton undergraduates on the French novel in 1930–31. He was struck by Maurois’s openness to an educational method utterly different from the one the writer had known in France, where students were never encouraged to have an informal exchange with their teachers. The account also triggered a long-forgotten memory of the pleasure Gossman had experienced as a fifteen-year-old IV Former in Scotland reading Maurois’s biography of Disraeli. As his own work on historically important, often overlooked figures...