La vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses by Christine Montalbetti (review)

participante active à cette recherche ne concerne pas seulement le quartier et ses habitants, et au-delà la France d’après-guerre; elle forme aussi un parcours personnel, celui d’une jeune Écossaise que rien ne prédestinait à devenir professeur de littérature française et résidente de la capitale, et encore moins sans doute à écrire une œuvre en français. Ce récit forme donc aussi la trame d’une transformation intérieure qui, en raison de sa générosité et de son abnégation, permet à sa narratrice—comme à ses lecteurs—de “renouer avec une sensation plus vive que [soi]-même” (165). Metropolitan State University of Denver Jean-François Duclos Montalbetti, Christine. La vie est faite de ces toutes petites choses. Paris: P.O.L, 2016. ISBN 978-2-8180-3993-9. Pp. 333. 17,50 a. From its first pages to its last, this is a book where the author goes to exceptional lengths to make the reader feel right at home, wagering upon a variety of gestures intended to foster a sense of narrative hospitality. Those effects are all the more welcome in view of the fact that the events that Montalbetti deals with take place in a world that very few of us have experienced. Her subject is STS-135, the final mission of NASA’s space shuttle program. It is an astonishing choice, considering her previous writings; and it’s a bold one, too, for it requires that she negotiate a new set of representational problems. Most of the latter devolve upon the real and the constraints that it imposes, for in this book Montalbetti seeks to engage the real as directly as she can, and to render an account of that engagement with a minimum of compromise. One of the techniques she relies upon as she chronicles this space mission, from its launch on 8 July 2011 to its return twelve days later, involves an accretion of detail, an “avalanche de détails” (269) in carefully constructed passages of description whose most concentrated moments recall certain exercises in hyperrealism. Having appropriated a staggering amount of archival material, Montalbetti turns it to her purpose in single-minded fashion. “Je m’appliquerais,” she remarks, “à ce que tout soit vertigineusement exact” (269). Another technique is an unrelenting focus upon the “small things” that her title invokes, whether those things be the bacteria that are annihilated when a packaged meal is prepared, or the fruit flies which serve as experimental subjects on the mission, or the tears that an astronaut sheds and quickly wipes away, lest they escape to float unattended in the weightless atmosphere of the cabin. For it is the small things that make a space mission possible, Montalbetti suggests—and it is also those small things that enable some kinds of literary communication . I have avoided the word“novel”until now, but the term roman is emblazoned on the cover of Montalbetti’s book, and she is unconditional in claiming that term for her own, stating that in this instance she has chosen to write “un roman sur une aventure réelle”(264).What gradually becomes clear is that the tension between truth 280 FRENCH REVIEW 90.4 Reviews 281 and fiction, between the real and the invented, continually poses the questions of what the novel is, and what it can become. Moreover, we may be persuaded that those categories are less inconsonant than we might have deemed them—especially when a novelist can sit down to chat with her principal character, and when a reader, with a couple of clicks of a mouse, can learn the title of that character’s doctoral dissertation. Yet another salient consideration is that the real must be imagined if we are ever to grasp it, most conspicuously in the case of events as extraordinary as the ones put on offer here. University of Colorado Warren Motte Nathan, Tobie. Ce pays qui te ressemble. Paris: Stock, 2015. ISBN 978-2-234-078222 . Pp. 540. 22,50 a. L’Égypte, pays d’origine du psychologue Nathan, est au cœur de ce nouveau roman. Le récit commence en 1925 dans Haret el Yahoud, le ghetto...