Beast by Elsa Boyer (review)

Reviews 257 companion.Will we ever crack the mystery of the mysterious bubbles? Basile, Camille’s ufologist companion, was perhaps not so far off the mark before his untimely death: “Si nous considérions la présence des dames blanches comme une chance, et non comme une épreuve, si nous les regardions comme des protectrices, et non des prédatrices” (119). Grand Valley State University (MI) Dan Golembeski Boyer, Elsa. Beast. Paris: P.O.L., 2015. ISBN 978-2-818-03673-0. Pp. 190. 13,25 a. The novel has built its generic reputation on a more or less distant relationship to the “real.” Beast elicits at least two questions about novelistic referentiality: not only how close it is to a real world, but also what kind of world it is depicting. Is this dystopia, fable, or something else? An opening scene in a small room plunged in darkness has readers scrambling to establish ground lines. Further details throw readers off: gray metal scales cover every surface of the room in which three characters wear masks with infrared lenses. The telegraphic characterizations of “coq, cheval, rat” (7) create indelible images of those animals. As the storyline develops, however, these identities seem strictly metaphorical: coq, who once he assumes presidential authority, indulges in plenty of crowing and little else; cheval, undercover henchman to the president, his metallic teeth and frequent resurrections from fatal injury suggesting superhuman capacities; and rat, burdened with the connotations of vermin slinking through trash heaps to carry out the president’s behest.While references to hair, hands, and feet imply that these animalistic references are figurative, a later reference to dogs suggests that distinctions between animal and human are blurred in Beast’s world: “Un chien tire une tige de métal hors de l’eau. Et si les chiens construisaient leurs villes sur et sous les nôtres, leurs tunnels, leurs abris. L’animal s’arrête” (50). The narrative follows the rise of coq to the height of his media-enhanced status. He dispatches rat to appropriate a young diva and reform her into a suitable and untraceable consort. Her role is to second coq in his highly-scripted public appearances, designed to garner uncritical support for his failed policies. Just as much of the novel follows rat, who skulks through an inhospitable cityscape,narrowly escaping deadly attacks.Surprisingly, his determination to execute his questionable mission is tempered with flashes of moral consciousness. As the tale progresses, coq’s ineffectiveness as a statesman becomes manifest as does the literal artificiality of his existence. He becomes increasingly reliant on advisors, medications, and machinery that drain him of all human qualities while his souped-up vehicle (the eponymous Beast) appropriates the life force that abandons the president.A bionic machine may trump all. This may sound like a prose version of every action movie of the last decades, the sort with special effects that leave nothing visual to the imagination. However, Boyer’s novel insists as well on the sentiment , that is,the extraordinary physical and emotional interpretation of the character’s experience, as though to impress on readers what action films do not represent. True to the novel’s requirement to address reality, however tangentially, Beast gestures to our contemporary world. We catch references to Sarkozy’s trophy wife, Obama’s armored limo,security people with unrevealed powers,and staged political events that confound popular criticism. If the novelist asks us to visualize and internalize the unimaginable, she may also be suggesting that what we do not see before our very eyes may yet have truths worth examining. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Chandernagor, Françoise. Vie de Jude, frère de Jésus. Paris: Albin Michel, 2015. ISBN 978-2-226-25994-3. Pp. 395. 23 a. Jude, the youngest of Marie’s seven children, wonders: “À quoi suis-je bon, moi, le dernier de la lignée?” (193). The answer is for him to become a scribe, and record the events he will have witnessed in the Palestine of the Roman occupation of the first century. It is a miserable Palestinian society, humiliated by the Romans, divided by internal religious strife and above all...