Noireclaire par Christian Bobin (review)

d’une publication. Ou encore lorsqu’elle recherche un nom de plume jusque dans À la recherche du temps perdu (47). La narratrice fait part au lecteur de sa peur devant l’ampleur et la responsabilité d’un tel récit. La narratrice entreprend une narration autour de la création de son ouvrage, en somme une méta-narration, où elle nous confie ses notes, ses doutes ainsi que les réactions de ses amis lorsqu’elle leur dit sur qui elle écrit: “Je note dans mon carnet de travail: ‘scène qui montre que Françoise Sagan n’avait jamais peur de rien’” (21). Doté d’une prose élégante, juste et semée d’anecdotes et de remarques parfois surprenantes—comme le fait que “Sagan est l’anagramme de ‘à sang’” (50)—ce récit de genre indéfinissable rend parfaitement hommage à l’année 1954 que vécut Sagan ainsi qu’aux personnes qui eurent une grande influence sur elle. Cependant, c’est également un récit exutoire qui semble avoir dit au revoir à la tristesse de la narratrice. California State University, San Marcos Véronique Anover Bobin,Christian. Noireclaire.Paris: Gallimard,2015.ISBN 978-2-07-011448-1.Pp.88. 11 a. In 1996, in response to the sudden death of the woman he loved, the author wrote a book of short essays, La plus que vive. Now, twenty years later, having published over two dozen books in the interim, he writes again of the woman he calls Ghislaine, this time in short prose poems addressed to her. As anyone who has suffered such a loss knows, love does not end with the death of the beloved, and the dead often remain vividly alive to those who love them. This is the case for Bobin, who finds death only a frail barrier between himself and Ghislaine, whom he imagines in heaven, but also present on earth though separated from him by her incorporeality. For example, he can drink a glass of water, but she cannot. In some ways she is more vividly present now than when she lived, as“le manque est la lumière donnée à tous”(13), but not always: “Je cherche ton visage comme on cherche l’interrupteur dans le noir”(63). Sometimes her death seems to have happened just a moment before, but not always, for he has forgotten most of her former telephone number. His own life, the “vie d’écriture,” he compares to “la rêverie de l’oiseau qui, contemplant le ciel vide, oublie un instant la faim” (24). Yet to write about Ghislaine’s absence and presence is to remember, not to forget, his hunger for her. These paradoxes are in a sense summed up by the book’s title: “Noireclaire. Ta mort n’y change rien: je te vois en mouvement, toujours avançant” (71). Ghislaine herself is paradoxical, “ange et pécheresse” (46), but the information he included about her in La plus que vive is largely missing in this book, whose focus is on the mourner, not the deceased. Much of his love now seems to be directed toward nature, particularly trees and birds. The prose poems are often built around surprising metaphors, as when he interprets broom flowers blown onto the windshield of his parked car as a “lettre adultère” that Ghislaine has left him (43) or 212 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 213 says that a poem is a flute made from holes pierced “dans l’os du langage” by the poet (63). Bobin’s university study of philosophy and his Christian faith seem to underlie much of the thought and feeling behind this book’s attempt to represent and cope with love that persists for a beloved who is more present in death than she may have been in life. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Carion, Christian, et Laure Irrmann. En mai, fais ce qu’il te plaît. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. ISBN 978-2-0813-6636-7. Pp. 150. 17 a. Toward the middle of this novel, one reads: “C’est tout un peuple qui se déverse sur les routes, comme si le pays perdait son sang en...