Un faux pas dans la vie d’Emma Picard by Matthieu Belezi (review)

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, the French government of the Third Republic promised them and many others four acres fertile to cultivate in Algeria. This was the plan of the French colonists to repopulate Algeria, which had lost 17% of its population, between 1866 and 1868, from a series of disasters. The reader hears one voice under two types of juxtaposed narrations. The first one is of the past in short segments by Emma in a captivating monologue addressed to her youngest son, recounting their move to the Algerian countryside between Mascara and Sidi Bel Abbès, the adversity of the circumstances of a woman’s life from the time they were offered the plot of land, the scarcity of water, the grasshoppers’ attack on the crop, the famine, and the earthquake. The second narration is also in the voice of Emma, directly talking to Léon in the present time, commenting rather than narrating and asking him rhetorical questions about his health and wellbeing. The latter is presented in italics, making it easier for the reader to distinguish between the two. The narration as well as the story rely on the strong character of Emma, a solid, maternal and independent figure who faces one disaster after another marked only by a brief respite, a short love story that helps her gather strength and face reality. Both narrations are interlaced and presented without punctuation , making the story move fluidly from past to present through the strength of the oral form that makes the events seem immediate and direct. In Emma’s tragic story of destitution despite her hard work in harsh conditions, the question remains: Who is really responsible for the tragic events in Algeria, the attitude of superiority of the white Christian colonizers, and the tragic conditions of life of the colonizers and the colonized in the promised land full of injustices? “On nous a jetés, nous les colons, abandonnés à notre sort de crève-la-faim sur des terres qui ne veulent et ne voudront jamais de nous” (253). It is ultimately a nightmare that started as a journey, a dream, and a promise of happiness. St. John’s University (NY) Zoe Petropoulou Bordage, Pierre. Les dames blanches. Nantes: L’Atalante, 2015. ISBN 978-2-84172718 -6. Pp. 380. 21 a. Sunrise in Nueil-les-Aubiers, sometime in the not-too-distant future. On that fateful morning, Léo looks out the kitchen window and spots a mysterious giant“egg” lying in the field just beyond the garden gate. The three-year-old alerts his mother, Élodie, still sipping her morning coffee and hardly interested in playing along with her son’s latest shenanigan. But looking out across the yard, there it is: a massive sphere. Léo darts out the front door. By the time an out-of-breath Élodie reaches the field, standing face-to-face with the enormous...