L’exercice de la médecine par Laurent Seksik (review)

Reviews 229 Les fréquentes parenthèses introduisant souvenirs et réflexions ralentissent l’action, confondent le développement chronologique, interrompent mêmes les crescendo les plus dramatiques de ce riche récit. Independent scholar Suzanne Gasster-Carrierre Seksik, Laurent. L’exercice de la médecine. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. ISBN 978-20813 -4387-0. Pp. 337. 20 a. This novel opens with Léna Kotev, a cancerologist, who is suffering from the“raide ennui de l’existence” (114). Quickly, Seksik pulls us back one hundred and ten years to Pavel Alexandrovitch Kotev, Jewish village doctor in pogrom-threatened Ludichev, in Russia, trying desperately to move medicine into the twentieth century.“Dépositaire de la misère et des splendeurs de Ludichev” (31), Kotev is stuck there because the czarist régime forbids travel to Jews. However, his eldest son Mendel is sent to Berlin where, at the time, a Jewish professional can aspire to anything. Seksik’s technique alternates between these two relatives separated by three generations, but sharing the field of malaise, medicine, and massacre. Our third Kotev, Léna’s father Tobias, is then introduced. Tobias is Mendel’s son. Tobias wishes to trace the family’s involvement in medicine back to the thérapeutes: Jewish tribe of caregivers, wiped out by Caligula (62). From Russia to Germany to France—fleeing pogroms and persecutions—this family has been involved in all of it. The reader learns of Léna’s abortion, and that she is probably sterile, and consequently the last of the practicing Kotevs. After Pavel’s turn-of-the-century story comes Mendel’s life in 1920s Germany. Does the massacre of all of one’s family shape one’s destiny? Can the suicide of one’s mother cause depression? Does Léna choose cancer because “il faut aimer la souffrance, celle des autres peut-être aussi la sienne propre” (151–52)? Jewish by the mother, doctor by the father: these two conditions in the history of this family from Pavel to Mendel to Tobias, and finally to Léna, summarize the novel. None of these characters has a single chance of happiness because of time, place, and religion. Cancer eats at all of them, whether it be the actual disease that Léna deals with or that of her ex-lover, Tobias’s potential cancer, the symbolic cancers of the Russian czarist society, or that of pre-Hitler Nazi Germany. Even the government of Stalin takes one of the Kotev doctors. From 1904 through the 1950s the“Jewish medical conspiracy”is blamed and punished in Russia, Germany, and France. Extremely well-written and documented, this novel is not for the faint of heart. It is overwhelmingly depressing, with a single note of hope at the end. That one family could have endured what this family endured is incredible, yet realistic based on location and era. Seksik’s appropriate use of Yiddish, Italian, and German aids in the comprehension of his work by showing how it spans both culture and civilization (or lack of it). This is not an easy read, but it is a recommended one. Alliance Française de Santa Rosa (CA) Davida Brautman Tilliette, Pierre-Alain. Un sentiment humain. Paris: Passage, 2015. ISBN 978-284742 -311-2. Pp. 351. 19 a. This Breton writer lives with his family in Paris, where he is conservateur des fonds étrangers at the bibliothèque de l’Hôtel de Ville. The humor, virtuosity, and lighthanded erudition of his first novel, Gapos: vies chimériques (2011), placed him squarely in the lineage of Rabelais to Joyce. Tilliette’s second novel has more than fulfilled his promise as one of the most arresting new voices on the French literary scene. Less ostensibly experimental in its composition than Gapos, it exploits the conventions of popular romance fiction as it plunges the reader into the separate stories of four unremarkable characters brought together by chance after a violent car accident. Un sentiment humain is by no means a superficially entertaining work, however, despite the engaging nature of the narrative. It is written with Tilliette’s unique linguistic inventiveness and explores many of the same philosophical motifs and themes found in...