Oscar by Mauricio Segura (review)

respectueux des vies agrippées sur ce banc de sable et avec une empathie qui va au-delà du reportage d’une fouille archéologique ordinaire. Pour lui, ressusciter les longues et terribles années d’abandon des “oubliés”, c’est revendiquer leur humanité, témoigner de l’énergie et de l’imagination qu’ils déploient à s’adapter, de “leur lutte opiniâtre pour survivre”(82) pour qu’enfin huit d’entre eux, huit seulement, soient recueillis par le chevalier de Tromelin, quinze ans plus tard. Earlham College (IN), emerita Annie Bandy Segura, Mauricio. Oscar. Montréal: Boréal, 2016. ISBN 978-2-7646-2422-7. Pp. 233. $22 Can. Many jazz aficionados know that, unlike most of his fellow jazz players, pianist Oscar Peterson was raised in Canada. His 1964 record on the new Mercury label, after all, was titled Canadiana Suite. In Segura’s new biographical novel, Oscar, the character so closely modeled on Peterson is less “a Canadian” than an Anglophone Montrealer of West Indian descent. A Montrealer of other-than-Canadian extraction himself, Segura—who, at five, immigrated to Quebec with his family following the 1974 Chilean coup d’État—is sensitive to the complexities of immigrant life in Montreal. The protagonist’s neighborhood of la Petite-Bourgogne is situated in a realistic midtwentieth -century Montreal, and the imagined intimacies of “Oscar P.’s” household reveal the material benefits of that place and time, as well as the sense of loss an immigrant there must have felt. The fathers in the mostly immigrant Montreal neighborhood make a decent living in the factories but cannot seem to forget the slower pace of their Caribbean chilhoods:“La courtepointe de champs de navets et de melons n’était plus qu’un souvenir doré dans la tête des aïlleuls du quartier” (12). When he arrived, Oscar’s father naïvely sought work in universities,“un hibiscus jaune de son île natale à la boutonnière” (15), before settling into a decent but unromantic career working for the national railroad.As this barely-cloaked biographical imagining unfolds, Oscar is as much a portrait of Montreal moving beyond its “deux solitudes” to become a more culturally complex city as it is the simple tale of an emerging jazz great. But it is that, too. Segura has done his homework, bringing in real-life jazz figures who were part of the real Oscar Peterson’s life. Jazz historians reading this novel will know best, but Segura’s version of Peterson’s longtime manager Norman Granz (“Norman G”) cleverly blends actual facts, like Granz’s role in organizing Peterson’s New York debut, with entertaining character development. When he visits Oscar’s household, we see Norman G. through Oscar’s mother’s suspicious, religious eyes. His voice “aussi suave que l’éternité,” he is the devil, come to take advantage of an ambitious young man: “C’est un homme tout à fait charmant, dit-elle, mais quand il passe d’une pièce à l’autre, les fleurs se fanent et une odeur de soufre reste” (132–33). We also get colorful glimpses of the superstar pianist Art Tatum (Peterson’s largest 218 FRENCH REVIEW 90.3 Reviews 219 influence in real life and in the novel), record label types and hangers-on, all researched sufficiently to seem believable to the documentarian but also interesting enough to accept as characters in fiction.A novelist, journalist, essayist, and screenwriter, Segura occasionally gets a little too magical-realist in his descriptions of Oscar’s family life, which can distract readers less interested in mystical rainstorms than in how Peterson got to record on the biggest record labels in America. But Segura decided to write his jazz biography as a novel, so a little improvisation inside a strong larger structure feels like a legitimate part of the deal. University of Wisconsin, Madison Ritt Deitz Sell, Maren, et Yann Andréa. L’histoire. Paris: Pauvert, 2016. ISBN 978-2-72021541 -4. Pp. 225. 16 a. Voici une autofiction à double voix: celle de l’éditrice Sell alternant avec des petits textes d’Andréa, le dernier compagnon de Marguerite Duras, décédée en 1996. Trois ans...