La source par Anne-Marie Garat (review)

“l’orientalisme doit être un humanisme” [313]). Il y sera aussi question des effets dramatiques du colonialisme sur l’histoire contemporaine du Moyen-Orient: “Des victimes européennes, des bourreaux à l’accent londonien. Un islam radical, nouveau et violent [...] et les seules victimes qui comptent sont en fin de compte des Européens. Pauvres Syriens. Leur destin intéresse bien peu nos médias, en réalité”(225). Et malgré de douloureuses longueurs, nous trouverons, perdue entre des pages parsemées de “lubie littéraire, la dernière tocade d’un érudit”(303) et de“bavardage gauche”(367), une prose des plus subtiles:“L’être est toujours dans cette distance, quelque part entre un soi insondable et l’autre en soi. Dans la sensation du temps. Dans l’amour, qui est l’impossibilité de la fusion entre soi et l’autre. Dans l’art, l’expérience de l’altérité” (304). Et c’est bien pour ces passages empreints de panache, de finesse et d’esprit que ce roman, au premier abord lourd, indigeste et pompeux, vaut finalement le détour. Baylor University (TX) Alexandre Thiltges Garat, Anne-Marie. La source. Arles: Actes Sud, 2015. ISBN 978-2-330-05318-5. Pp. 379. 22 a. When one stumbles, all unawares, into an unmapped village called“Le Mauduit”; when the first person one meets is a superbly solitary child named “Lottie”; when all of a sudden it begins raining adjectives, like this: “D’immenses nuages obstruaient l’horizon, comme d’un crépuscule leur ombre découpait contre l’azur des massifs escarpés marbrés de brume, elle se crut transportée dans une vallée encaissée au pied des sommets altiers, une région inconnue et pourtant la même” (9); then it is legitimate to presume that something exceptional is afoot. Three hundred and seventy pages thereafter, one can close this book with the satisfaction of having had one’s presumption confirmed. In between those moments, there is plenty to occupy the reader—and more than enough to occupy the narrator, too. The latter is a university professor who will shortly be teaching a seminar on the history of French peasantry in the last half-century. What better place to do research on that subject than in the municipal archives of le Mauduit, she reasons, for that village seems to be a place where history comes alive. Indeed that proves to be the case, but not in the way that the narrator anticipated. In one sense, history is incarnated in the person of Lottie, ninety years old and largely toothless in the narrative present. She has watched the twentieth century flow through her village, sometimes in full spate, sometimes in apparent ebb. If her grasp of world events is tenuous, she can recall local history with a great deal more detail than the municipal archives furnish. The narrator receives Lottie’s account of things in fits and starts, as frequent shifts in focus and dizzying leaps in space and time complicate a story that is by no means simple to begin with. Like a few other places one could name, le Mauduit is a site where “le passé s’est mal passé” (238); in other words, bad things happened there, and those bad things continue to inflect the 234 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 235 present. In order to understand that phenomenon, the narrator seeks to identify its source, all the while recognizing the chimerical nature of that quest. For memory is not always reliable—and it is often in its moments of unreliability that it is the most captivating.“Le passé recomposé du souvenir se complique des passés inventés”(351), remarks the narrator, realizing that it is in that complication that narrative interest resides. Lottie’s skills as a storyteller beggar those of the narrator, however. She knows when to disclose information and when to withhold it; she flatters, she inveigles, she commands; she rubs fiction against fact in order to make sparks fly. One may accuse her of infidelity with regard to lived event, or one may admit that “event” is itself a highly constructed notion, a notion that assumes significance only...