Lectures du Spleen de Paris éd. par Steve Murphy (review)

because their voices constitute important perspectives in current debates on the country’s past, present, and future. As true as Munro’s assertion is—and this reader could not agree with it more—this book also speaks more broadly to the cultural, political, aesthetic, and historical importance of literature as a valid means of creating knowledge. It offers inspired, articulate reasons as to why Haitian literature, and fiction as a genre, provides invaluable testimony for better understanding countries and their people in difficult times. Boise State University (ID) Jason Herbeck Murphy, Steve, éd. Lectures du Spleen de Paris. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7535-3490-2. Pp. 372. 18 a. These excellent essays from researchers in the United States, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom move the prose poems from the status of poor cousin to Les fleurs du mal to that of main progenitor of Baudelairean and modern poetry studies. Inevitable comparisons with Baudelaire’s lyrical poetry have resulted in the prose poems’ delayed recognition (Kopp) and, until recently, in critics’ ambivalence toward them (Vaillant). Murphy’s volume, however, shows the continued relevance of pairing and contrasting the verse and prose, the sincere and ironic, the dream and disenchantment —always interrelated in Baudelairean poetics. Scholars have grappled with the absence of unity, the missing architecture of the collection, and what preference and significance to give to its two titles, Petits poèmes en prose and Le spleen de Paris. Many of the contributors, notably Murphy and Steinmetz, focus on the context of publication, the precursors, pre-texts, and genesis of Le spleen de Paris. Murphy provides a cogent analysis of Gaspard de la nuit’s importance as pre-text; he examines in detail Le spleen’s three-stage genesis (1855, 1862, 1865) and concludes that the project may have been unfinished but it is not lacking. Throughout, essays explore what makes the prose poem distinctive as compared to the Romantic lyric (Combe), but also,more unexpectedly,to the epic (Élie),the Balzacian novel (Schuerewegen), and the newspaper (Vaillant). Useful and perceptive close readings of individual poems, such as those on“Mademoiselle Bistouri”(Olmsted and Thélot),“L’étranger”(Scepi), “La belle Dorothée” (Scott) or “La femme sauvage et la petite-maîtresse” (Sanyal), among others, sensitize readers to Baudelaire’s rhetorical strategies. Others fruitfully pair the prose poems with poems in Les fleurs du mal, going beyond the “doublets”: Bataillé compares “Rêve parisien” and “La chambre double”; Sangsue contrasts the macabre ghosts in Les fleurs with their parodic counterparts in Le spleen; Westerwelle confronts the rugged, ironic voice of the prose poems with the harmony of the lyric. The last two essays insightfully reveal the relationship between content and language in the prose poem. The expertly-conceived volume provides theoretical insights into how the prose poem destabilizes the production of meaning through “entropy” 272 FRENCH REVIEW 90.2 Reviews 273 (Chambers), playfulness (Kliebenstein), doubling (Bertrand), or the prosaic use of language (Laforgue). Most important in this endeavor, however, are Baudelaire’s narrative strategies: his is an unreliable narrator who, short of deliberately lying to the reader, often has“blind spots”(Scott) and skirts the truth, if such a standard were even to exist in the world of the prose poem. Carpenter summarizes well the difficulties of understanding Baudelaire’s prose poems: readers are always second-guessing their interpretations. Finally, Lectures du Spleen de Paris highlights the complexity of Baudelaire’s ideological references that confound the reader. In the section titled “Historicosociopoliticocritique,” St. Clair sees in “Les yeux des pauvres” the denunciation of the violence of progress and poverty. Gouvard carefully interprets the ideological connotations of égalité, fraternité, and citoyenneté to enlighten Baudelaire’s disenchantment with republican values. This volume constitutes essential reading for anyone teaching, researching, or reading Le spleen de Paris. Florida State University Aimée Boutin Nacache Ruimi, Claudine. Albert Cohen: une poétique de la table. Rennes: PU de Rennes, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7535-4135-1. Pp. 356. 21 a. Comment unifier les composantes d’une œuvre aussi polyphonique et éclectique que celle d’Albert Cohen? C’est pourtant ce qu’entreprend Nacache Ruimi en proposant d’analyser l’œuvre...