La gaieté par Justine Lévy (review)

Reviews 269 portés par un racisme à fleur de peau sur le Genève d’aujourd’hui soumis à une atmosphère délétère des milieux onusiens et internationaux. Il s’agit tout simplement d’un récit plat, embrouillé, qui ne happe à aucun moment la curiosité du lecteur. University of Maryland Joseph Brami Lévy, Justine. La gaieté. Paris: Stock, 2015. ISBN 978-2-234-07026-4. Pp. 215. 18 a. Louise has been struggling with depression. This narrative appears to be her cure, but her remembered past pulls her away from the present into a self-created myth about motherhood. Her backstory includes drug use, her father’s dependable consolation, and her marriage to Pablo. When Pablo was ready for a family, she acquiesced and became pregnant ten years ago. Pregnancy became the line of demarcation for her: she decided then not to be sad any longer. She would consciously try to be joyful for her progeny’s sake because, she asserts, her future children do not deserve her sadness. So Louise’s voice begins here to explain her suspiciously joyful odyssey. During her pregnancy with her first child Angèle, Louise’s mother Alice dies.Alice was a woman who stopped trying to be a mother when Louise was eleven. A heroine and opium abuser, Alice thus contributed to Louise’s depressive jags. Louise now believes that her mother’s ghost sometimes returns, inhabits Louise’s body, and changes Louise’s behavior such that her daughter Angèle does not recognize her own mother during fits of rage. Pregnancy does occasionally help Louise to manage her depression and to quit smoking. With her focus on searching for a joyful life, she ignores herself by displacing her sadness in altruism that, by its nature, excludes her. She claims having tried to isolate her sadness in its own room. But, despite herself, her maternity causes her to reflect on her own childhood and how she thinks she has been an inadequate daughter (see Lévy’s 2009 novel, Mauvaise fille) by not having helped Alice get through her various addictions. Divorced from Louise’s father, Alice descended into selfdestructive behavior. Meanwhile, Louise’s successive stepmothers, the new wives of her divorced father, do their best to destabilize any maternal reassurance Louise expects from her father’s side about the joys of motherhood. Despite her conscious strategies to protect her children, she lapses into depressive behavior and realizes that she comes dangerously close to continuing the cycle of irresponsible maternity passed on to her from Alice. Although Louise deliberately focuses on keeping sadness away from her children, there are moments when she simply cannot control her own maternal rage. Louise’s writing style reflects her struggles. Her writing lapses into long paragraphs in an oral, out-of-breath flow of words that incorporate dialogues with others and blend into her interior monologue about how she becomes another by descending into “un creux à l’intérieur” (27). This interior abyss engulfs her and takes over her writing such that the reader is mesmerized by accompanying her descent. Phrases coined by others become gerunds to display her own reflective re-formulation of words, especially recollected advice given by her mother. Overall, this work strikes book reviewers as a roman à clef for Justine Lévy’s life, but this attribution does not fill in the blanks about the sources for the social conditioning of Louise’s ironic self-delusion to be happy about maternity. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Monénembo, Tierno. Les coqs cubains chantent à minuit. Paris: Seuil, 2015. ISBN 9782 -02-108895-3. Pp. 188. 17 a. Ce roman se situe dans le Cuba contemporain, mais à travers ses personnages, nous découvrons en microcosme la triste évolution vers la tyrannie et la corruption d’une révolution entreprise dans la bonhomie et dans l’espoir. Le personnage central n’est jamais directement présent. Il est né d’une mère cubaine et d’un père guinéen, musicien de passage à Cuba à l’époque des rapprochements simultanés de ce pays avec l’Union soviétique et la Guinée (1965–1978).Lorsque la jeune Cubaine tombe enceinte...