Monarques par Sébastien Rutés, Juan Hernández Luna (review)

Reviews 227 Brown, and others with even clearer and often American literary references. These short chapters (three to seven pages) facilitate the reading and intensify the story’s progress to an interesting postlude. Metropolitan State University of Denver, emeritus Alain Ranwez Rutés, Sébastien, et Juan Hernández Luna. Monarques. Paris: Albin Michel, 2015. ISBN 978-2-226-31810-7. Pp. 376. 21,50 a. This novel is a complex yet highly rewarding work. It is divided into three parts. The first is an epistolary novel set in the 1930s.We read the exchange of letters between a Mexican graphic artist named Augusto and a young French communist named Jules. The two have never met and their correspondence comes about by chance. It is inspired by Augusto’s love and pursuit of a German femme fatale who calls herself Loreleï. The latter, like her mythical namesake, is a siren who lures men to their destruction. She is actually a spy and secret agent of the Third Reich, but she turns out in the end to have a heart of gold. One of her missions is to infiltrate the production of the Disney animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It is the wish of Hitler and Goebbels that the cartoon be made a vehicle for the Teutonic values they claim to promote. References to Disney’s heroine and her seven friends abound throughout the book.We also get to know about the lives and personalities of Augusto and Jules.Jules is a dedicated communist who works for the daily newspaper L’Humanité and even gets to meet Louis Aragon. He also enjoys working at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, especially when wrestling matches are the featured attraction. Some of the wrestlers get to be significant secondary characters in the plot. Of equal interest are some nonpaying tenants in Augusto’s apartment house in Mexico City. These include a dwarf named Napoleon and the prostitute called Evangelia. There are also the other Nazi agents associated with Loreleï, whose real identities, like hers, are never known. The middle part of the book is a kind of historical novel, written in the third person, about the ugliness and horror of the Nazi era. It describes the tragic impact of the occupation of France and the preceding fascist takeover of Spain on the lives of innocent individuals . Among the victims are Jules’s young Jewish wife and her family. Ironically, they are held prisoner for several days in the same Vél d’Hiv that was once Jules’s favorite haunt before they are sent to concentration camps. The third part of the book again becomes an epistolary novel. This time, however, it is a contemporary email correspondence between Augusto’s granddaughter Nieves in Mexico City and Jules’s grandson Daniel in Paris. They become obsessed with the letters and biographies of the grandfathers they never knew, and they try to use them as a way to define their own identities. Their emails are often interrupted by a series of mysterious soliloquies d’outre-tombe emerging from dunes along a seashore. The reader becomes progressively aware that the speaker is Jules, who was not killed in battle in 1940 as was believed. In fact, he made his way to Mexico where he finally met Augusto and spent his last years together with him and their companion Loreleï. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Samlong, Jean-François. Hallali pour un chasseur. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ISBN 9782 -07-014986-5. Pp. 300. 19,50 a. Ce roman se déroule sur plusieurs niveaux: il offre une découpe de la société contemporaine réunionnaise en campant la vie de ses protagonistes; il évoque aussi le passé esclavagiste de l’île et met en exergue un racisme qui se prolonge dans les attitudes et le vocabulaire des personnages; finalement, il s’ouvre sur une perspective psychologique, la recherche du pardon et de la rédemption. Son fil conducteur? La chasse et le goût inassouvi de la traque, l’odeur du sang, la proie inerte aux pieds de l’homme. La narratrice d’Hallali pour un chasseur a pour cible Kalla, peut-être...