La mer à courir par Jean-Luc Marty (review)

Reviews 275 qui se trouve pris entre État et islamistes, autrement dit entre la peste et le choléra, explique Adam. À la fin du véritable tour de force qu’est ce roman, le lecteur, malheureusement, demeure peu convaincu du succès du personnage. Il se trouve que le dernier des Sijilmassi échoue sur une plage, nu comme Adam, mais on se pose la question de savoir s’il lui reste suffisamment de conscience pour comprendre s’il a ou non réussi dans sa quête. Western Kentucky University Karin Egloff Marty, Jean-Luc. La mer à courir. Paris: Julliard, 2014. ISBN 978-2-260-02075-2. Pp. 260. 19 a. This novel puzzles the reader in its early chapters. We seem to be reading three different stories. The first is about a young couple on the Atlantic coast of France, Josse and Livia. They get into a boating accident in which the wife, who we learn later was pregnant, is killed. The second story involves Paul, a young Tahitian who has come to Paris to do university studies in geography. Paul lives in an apartment in a suburban HLM as the guest of Eddy, a young Frenchman whom we and Paul never see. During his brief stay in Tahiti, before the time of the novel, Eddy invited Paul to come to France to study. The third narrative concerns Virginie, a young woman who has a temporary job at a news information agency, which is also located in the suburbs of Paris. Virginie is obsessed with the history of Bolivia and the loss of its coastline in a war with Chile. She yearns for the return to Bolivia of the territory its neighbor stole from her.As the novel progresses, all these different threads are brought together. The unifying agent is the journal which once belonged to Paul’s stepfather Josse and which his mother Tokahi asked him to take to a certain person in France. It turns out that Josse, now dead, a physician in Tahiti, was the young man in the boating accident and that Virginie, who was safely delivered in spite of her mother’s death, is his long-lost daughter. Virginie was raised by her grandparents in France after Josse in his grief sought refuge like Gauguin in the faraway tropics of the South Pacific. Josse’s travel account is filled with emotional addresses to his late wife about the places he sees. Livia was originally from Bolivia, and this explains her daughter’s obsessive interest in that country’s fortunes. Paul and Virginie, destined by their emblematic names to come together, become slowly acquainted after he deposits her father’s diary at her place of work. They lay eyes on each other for the first time while each is walking along the river. Virginie is at first both attracted to and frightened by the athletic young Tahitian. In the course of time they become friends and, after much hesitation, lovers at the novel’s end. In addition to being a love story, Marty’s novel is a stark portrayal of life in the suburban housing developments of Paris. The people of color from France’s former colonies who live there survive in poverty and misery on the margins of French society. They are the victims both of the police, who harass them in the name of the established order, and the criminal elements among themselves. Theirs is a Dantean hell from which there appears to be no hope of escape. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Matthieussent, Brice. Luxuosa. Paris: P.O.L., 2015. ISBN 978-2- 8180-2178-1. Pp. 384. 18 a. As he boards the Luxuosa, Matthieussent’s namesake narrator is transformed into a crane, and this metamorphosis gives a fantastical twist to the invitation au voyage the writer offers us. From now on he is Lola, a Converse-wearing, Tati-bag-toting, Persolsunglass -wearing, Pelikan-smoking, common crane, who, as an outsider to the human species, is poised to analyze the peculiar entertainment experience promised by modern-day cruises. Toward this end, Lola has forsaken her aviary migratory habits and eschewed the scenic stops on the ship’s Mediterranean journey in...