Un été by Vincent Almendros (review)

and money place this work squarely in the realm of cultural history. The sophisticated economic and monetary principles involved are explained and contextualized fully enough that the reader whose focus resides in literary or cultural studies will not be overwhelmed.While Stuff and Money is obviously of interest to scholars and students of the French Revolution, it also has broad cultural relevance, worth the attention of a wider public of general eighteenth-century specialists. Ohio University (OH) Christopher Coski Creative Works edited by Jean-François Duclos Almendros, Vincent. Un été. Paris: Minuit, 2015. ISBN 978-2-7073-2814-4. Pp. 95. 11,50 a. Like university professors,creative writers are often thought to confirm the measure of their talent with their second book, rather than their first. In this second book, Almendros puts on offer a reader-friendly, plot-driven parable of brotherly devotion couched in a tale of the sea. Pierre is the narrator (though one learns his name only two-thirds of the way into the story he tells); his companion is a young and absolutely blonde Norwegian named Lone. They have been invited by Pierre’s brother, Jean, and his own companion, Jeanne, to spend a month cruising the Mediterranean in a sailboat . Everything is hunky-dory until Pierre and Lone clap eyes upon that latter craft, which seems impossibly small to them. Still, what better place might one imagine for people to get to know one another? Pierre is an inveterate landlubber, and he is more than mildly astonished to learn that his brother has mastered the ways of the sea. Everything appears unreal to Pierre, unreal and strange: the boat’s rigging and equipment, the rituals of onboard life, the lexicon of boating, everything. Everything, that is, with the exception of Jeanne, who is to the contrary very familiar to Pierre, by virtue of the fact that she had been his partner, up until the day seven years ago when she left him for his brother. These waters are troubled, one understands. In the middle of the Bay of Naples and in the middle of the month of August, moreover, the heat is overwhelming. Conditions aboard are difficult, most especially in what passes for the cabin:“En bas, l’air était irrespirable. Il s’exhalait une émanation étrange, un mélange écœurant de renfermé et d’effluves salins qui donnait envie d’aérer. Je me sentais de plus en plus nauséeux”(27). One cannot budge an inch without bumping into someone else, and the permutational possibilities for bumping are very limited indeed. Pierre and Lone both long for more elbow room than they currently enjoy, and the exiguous space of the sailboat may provoke a mild sense of claustrophobia-by-proxy in those readers most open to suggestion. The space of this novel is likewise exiguous: 254 FRENCH REVIEW 89.4 Reviews 255 just eighty-odd pages (and sparsely furnished ones, at that), organized in twenty-three very brief chapters. Barely enough room to tell a story about brothers, let alone a story about the sea. Almendros stakes his minimalist wager with a great deal of conviction, however, and he displays considerable resourcefulness in the way he keeps his reader off balance, as if on a swaying deck in a rising swell. Whether we eventually find our sea legs or not will be a matter of individual constitution; but the voyage will not be long enough to test us beyond endurance, and at its end there is the shining promise of land,“ferme et rassurante” (24). University of Colorado Warren Motte Belezi, Matthieu. Un faux pas dans la vie d’Emma Picard. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. ISBN 978-2-0812-9365-6. Pp. 255. 18 a. After C’était notre terre (2008) and Les vieux fous (2011), Belezi’s latest fiction (based on true facts) closes a trilogy devoted to Algeria. The reader hears exclusively the voice of the main character, Emma. Given the miserable circumstances of the widowed Emma and her four sons Charles, Joseph, Eugène, and Léon in Alsace, they take the challenge and move to colonized Algeria to work and prosper. At the end of the 1860s...