Une enfance de rêve par Catherine Millet (review)

esthétisante, des éléments souvent brutaux qui constituent l’univers déshumanisé des hommes de pouvoir, est peut-être de suggérer subtilement cette ligne de fuite vers la potentialité féminine (féministe?) qui vient casser les codes établis. University of Missouri, Kansas City Nacer Khelouz Millet, Catherine. Une enfance de rêve. Paris: Flammarion, 2015. ISBN 978-2-08123791 -9. Pp. 284. 19,50 a. Psychoanalysis explains our behavior in terms of our origins. Those who are fascinated by Millet’s writings may want to consult this narrative of her beginnings in the Paris suburb of Bois-Colombes. She identifies this village with a mythical history similar to that of Balbec for Proust. Space surely piques her interest early, especially the horizon and the vertical limits suggested by mountain peaks. The spatial dimensions and limitations of her topology recur throughout this memoir that sometimes borders on the fictive recreations of Proust. As a girl, Millet plays hopscotch with the goal named ciel, an abstract place written on the ground. Related to these spatial dimensions are the moral boundaries that she claims are “plus difficiles à franchir que les limites matérielles”(24). Thus we encounter her two reasons for writing this memoir: understanding how one grows up without moral principles and how the desire for writing originates. Catherine sees herself as an accountant and chronicler of her family whose nucleus erodes into stories about two adulterers. Her father returns after having been a POW in Germany for five years. During those years, Félix, the father’s best friend, becomes an avuncular figure for Catherine in her girlhood when she visits him in the country. Her readings about the countryside in novels help her remain sane as her parents argue constantly after her father’s return.Eventually their relationship turns violent, and violence rules among the family members to the point that neighbors try to intervene in“la famille un peu spéciale du septième”(92). She reads as many books as possible to fill in the gaps about what her parents and friends do not tell her. She enrolls in Catholic religious classes where the lessons of catechism seem abstract to her. Nevertheless, she maintains a personal relationship with God to whom she regularly speaks internally. The maleness of her God is striking because the authors she reads are also principally male. Through her readings she begins to see herself as a writer while substituting herself for the novels’ male and female characters and thus learns to transcend gender boundaries by belonging to the“genre versatile”(186).She describes in detail her struggles with puberty, masturbation, and the female aggravations of menstruation. But this physical procession toward adulthood does not ground her tendency toward dreaminess. In her definition of one of her favorite words, rêvasserie, Millet sets up her self-description as “une image de soi en vêtement de rêve” (225). These daydreams project her writing beyond the narratives she reads by assimilating social obligations toward others learned from Albert Schweitzer’s example.Admittedly 242 FRENCH REVIEW 90.1 Reviews 243 conversant with psychoanalysis, she sometimes muddles her reflections in details of recollection thereby precluding self-analysis about why she included what she did. Overall, this memoir could have been richer and consequently disappoints because Millet set the bar so high by comparing herself to Proust. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Nothomb,Amélie. Le crime du comte Neville. Paris: Albin Michel, 2015. ISBN 978-2226 -31809-1. Pp. 135. 15 a. La romancière belge plonge ses lecteurs dans l’univers de la noblesse sur le point de perdre sa fortune et dont fait partie le comte de Neville, héros de ce dernier roman. Nous retrouvons avec délectation la présence du champagne et le thème de l’adolescence qui, en faisant ressortir des beautés ou des laideurs uniques, constitue aussi la source de cruelles injustices. Le crime du comte Neville propose également des mystères qui ne sont révélés qu’à la fin. Nothomb sait en effet nous tenir en haleine jusqu’à la dernière page dans ce court texte qui alterne habilement la...