À ce stade de la nuit par Maylis de Kerangal (review)

Reviews 237 charged characters, and intriguing intertextual references combine with multi-sensory descriptions to make for a stylistically dense, but very readable novel. Surreptitious manipulations,covert political collaborations,underground organizations,and corrupt economics effectively lure the reader’s curiosity into the dark network that thrives beneath the superficial luster of the respected Morvan clan. However, some of the plot twists tip the novel’s realism toward the impossible, bordering on absurdity. Grangé’s fusion of disparate topics, such as religion and militarism, sexuality and violence, politics and medical science, can make it seem as if he is trying too hard to touch on all crime-novel themes. But this combination also underscores the complexity of human existence in its most malevolent forms. Grangé makes the argument that in a realm where individual, biological, and cultural memory are irrevocably linked, preconceived distinctions between faith and madness, suffering and empowerment, good and bad, are ultimately meaningless. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Nathalie G. Cornelius Kerangal, Maylis de. À ce stade de la nuit. Paris: Verticales, 2015. ISBN 978-2-07010754 -4. Pp. 74. 7,50 a. Set in the very early morning under a halo of kitchen light and accompanied by little more than a late-night radio voice, these pages of reflections link distant geographies , personal memories, myths, and a strong dose of insight. The text was produced in response to an invitation to the author from the Fondation Facim to write about landscapes, however that term might be interpreted. Kerangal gives herself ample geographic range, mentally inventorying such places as diverse as volcanic Stromboli and the Siberian taiga, or “mythical” places such as Hispaniola, the Australian outback , and the Lampedusa of Visconti’s 1963 film, Il Gattopardo. From this assembled landscape, she reflects on human attachments to place. But she also poses broader questions: what makes a land belong to us? Or is it we who belong to the land? What happens to us—body, mind, and soul—when we are landless, say, disenfranchised from the land we live upon (which often translates as “poor”) or expulsed from the land that is ours (i.e., refugees)? Kerangal thinks about what it means to carry geography within us like an origin and a compass—or even an ancestral songline. She also ponders what it must be like to perish nameless and landless, yet in sight of shore. Thus, the tiny island of Lampedusa looms large in the writer’s nighttime thoughts on 3 Oct. 2013 because of the catastrophe of that same day, the sinking of a fishing boat illicitly transporting some five hundred migrants from Eritrea, Somalia, and Ghana. The shipwreck was not a unique event, except perhaps in terms of metrics: 360 lives lost only two kilometers from Lampedusa. Kerangal does not shy from pointing at the bitter irony in these catastrophes: for instance, that European peoples for centuries landed on foreign shores with a sense of entitlement but now finesse the laws of hospitality toward those making for their own beaches and borders. À ce stade de la nuit should not be too hastily read lest one miss the exquisite precision of its prose and its quiet but firm indignation over contemporary geopolitics. Lawrence University (WI) Eilene Hoft-March Lafon, Marie-Hélène. Chantiers. Mercuès: Busclats, 2015. ISBN 978-2-36166-0321 . Pp. 112. 12 a. Dans leur manifeste Pour une littérature-monde (2007),quarante-quatre écrivains— dont Maryse Condé, Jacques Godbout, Anna Moï et Tahar Ben Jelloun—ont salué le grand nombre de prix littéraires français qui venaient d’être décernés à des écrivains d’outre-France,et désigné un tel succès comme l’effet d’une“révolution copernicienne.” Affirmant la dissolution du centre depuis lequel était supposée rayonner une littérature franco-française, les signataires ont de même dénoncé les tendances nombrilistes de cette même littérature “sans autre objet qu’elle-même” qui, “ne renvoyant [...] qu’à d’autres textes dans un jeu de combinaisons sans fin [...] n’avait plus qu’à se regarder écrire”. À jeter un coup d’œil sur Chantiers, on se douterait qu’il s’agit précisément du genre de...