L’anniversaire du roi par Marc Trillard (review)

dans la nuit”, telle la luciole,“une petite rareté miraculeuse, une rencontre fortuite qui irradie l’esprit et illumine la pénombre de sa frêle stimulation luminescente”(100). La lecture de ce livre permettra aux familiers de l’œuvre d’en saisir un peu mieux l’alchimie. Ralston Valley High School (CO) Christian Roche Trillard, Marc. L’anniversaire du roi.Arles: Actes Sud, 2016. ISBN 978-2-330-058890 . Pp. 284. 20 a. Vincent-Vong Levantin had a Cambodian mother whom he never knew and a French father. As a young man he made a striking debut as a painter, but by the time he was thirty-six he had become the victim of sundry art world machinations. Burnt-out, he travels to Cambodia, a country haunted by its terrorist past, in hopes of inspiration and somehow resurrecting his career. When he realizes that Norodom Sihanouk, Cambodia’s titular king, is about to turn ninety, V-V has a singular idea. He proposes to the Cambodian and the French governments that he organize an atelier which will produce portraits of ninety of the country’s citizens to celebrate l’anniversaire du roi. Each painting will display the quiet heroism of Cambodians and their love for their ruler. His real goal is to make a lot of money off the project, so when it is accepted he immediately gathers a group of local art students and sets to work. All goes well until a journalist discovers that one of the portraits is that of a notorious political dissident. It seems that one of V-V’s young recruits is engagé on the wrong side of the political divide. Immediately official Cambodian and French support for the project is withdrawn. This leads V-V into a new maze of machinations, this time political rather than artistic. He makes and breaks deals with one side and then the other. Finally, when it appears V-V has arranged things to his financial satisfaction by gaining the royal family’s support for making the now eighty-nine paintings part of a memorial to the late king, upheaval once again explodes in his life. One of his students kills himself at the service to protest the government’s refusal to prosecute former Khmer Rouge officials responsible for untold deaths. As the novel ends, the normally selfconfident and amoral V-V is a broken man. The novel’s strength is in its depiction of the terrible cruelty of the Khmer Rouge’s repression of its own people.A Khmer Rouge guard explains to a prisoner:“Vivant tu ne sers à rien. Mort, tu feras de l’engrais”(166). Otherwise, the summary of the plot is more compelling than its narration in the novel. There are too many set pieces governed by all too typical reflections on human hypocrisy and baseness.As Sihanouk’s body is wheeled off the plane returning it from China, a minister loyal to the dead king notes the crocodile tears of the assembled mourners. V-V’s self-absorption is mitigated by his love for a beautiful Cambodian woman who had a child when she was in her early teens. Unknown to him, his mother bore him when she was thirteen years old. The reader is asked to believe that V-V’s 232 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 233 discovery of love has somehow humanized him. Such things may happen in life, but not convincingly in this novel. Florida State University, emeritus William Cloonan Trouillot, Lyonel. Kannjawou. Arles: Actes Sud, 2016. ISBN 978-2-330-05875-3. Pp. 193. 18 a. An impoverished street serves as a microcosm of the whole in Trouillot’s new novel. Following a similar approach used by another Haitian author, Emmelie Prophète in Impasse Dignité (FR 86.6), Trouillot dissects the dynamics and dysfunction of his country via a focused study of a group of friends living in lack on the “rue de l’Enterrement.” Leading up to the local decaying cemetery, this street is not an altogether bad location to inhabit, we are told by Man Jeanne, the novel’s doyenne of sage advice and adages, since its presence and the tinkling sound of grave...