Le voyageur aux mille tours: les ruses de l’écriture du monde à la Renaissance par Frédéric Tinguely (review)

of Beckett’s literary and artistic points of contact during his own life. Robert Reginio and Joanne Shaw explore his relationship to the visual arts, while others place individual works in dialogue with other writers and thinkers, including Sartre and Bergson. The second section expands its scope to include contexts beyond Beckett’s own times, and many contributors continue finding new contextual lenses through which to read Beckett via individual close readings, particularly Julien Carrière’s excellent analysis of Happy Days alongside the tenth canto of Dante’s Inferno, Tom Vandevelde’s inquiry into how the tools of narratology may be used to analyze the voices of the plays and radio pieces, and Edward Bizub’s idiosyncratic but entirely compelling reading of how Estragon’s boots in En attendant Godot reveal how Beckett’s“signature”is inscribed in his text.These close readings sit alongside more systemic essays,ones situating Beckett’s “relations with literary institutions and the media” (9) and often sociologically inspired , including such stand-outs as Angela Moorjani’s reading of Molloy in relation to the postwar literary scene in France and Andrew Kincaid’s claims for the continued relevance of the rhetoric of torture in Endgame. These are just some of the many exciting essays collected here, in a volume that is sure to contain required reading for anyone working in Beckett studies. Towson University (MD) Jacob Hovind Tinguely, Frédéric. Le voyageur aux mille tours: les ruses de l’écriture du monde à la Renaissance. Paris: Champion, 2014. ISBN 978-2-7453-2645-4. Pp. 244. 45 a. This welcome volume by a specialist of Early Modern travel literature gathers together fourteen chapters. As the author notes—and this reader thinks he keeps his promise—the nine previously published texts have been reworked“afin d’être ressaisis dans [...] une profonde cohérence” (9). The coherence is provided by the figure of polytropos Odysseus referenced by the collection’s title. Odysseus was a complex figure in Renaissance France: Pierre Belon may well have seen in him“le plus sage et prudent d’entre les autres princes illustres” (11), other contemporary authors underscored instead the geographic and testimonial superiority of modern travelers (13–16). Moreover, as Tinguely notes, whereas a Renaissance traveler “en quête de légitimité” might allude to Odysseus, “le poète engagé au service de la même opération de promotion ” might prefer to avoid association with “[ce] personnage à la réputation encombrante” (17). The studies collected here all attempt to go beyond “le bon et le mauvais legs d’Ulysse,” suggesting that “l’écriture du monde, à la Renaissance, fonctionne sur [...] un mode odysséen”(17). The studies are divided into four sections. Complementing recent work on Renaissance pilgrimage, the first studies the textual and epistemological stakes of accounts of travel to the East. The second focuses on a wider variety of travel accounts, to ask questions about their ocular strategies. The third contains three studies about Jean de Léry’s Histoire d’un voyage en la terre du 236 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 237 Brésil. The final section takes a more anthropological look at the metaphorical dimensions of certain travel accounts. In addition to Léry, authors studied include Jean Thenaud (chapter 2), Bertrand de la Boderie (chapter 3), Jean Chesneau (chapter 4), Montaigne (chapters 8, 11, and 12), as well as other lesser-known figures. This rich collection, whose close-readings provide new insights on both canonical and lesscanonical works, concludes with a defense of, and a plea for, topographic reading. Tinguely argues convincingly that Renaissance travel literature, written in a world whose expanse and complexity had suddenly increased exponentially, “déploie des stratégies de représentation subtiles, confinant souvent à la ruse, telles que seul un examen rapproché est en mesure de les mettre au jour” (221). This extended study of écriture odysséenne thus ultimately advances a model of lecture odysséenne defined by “la nécessité de sa constante réactivation face aux pièges de la réduction référentielle” and which might also be called, in Tinguely’s terms,“slow reading”(221):“le ralentissement de la lecture, malgré l’apparente...