Charlotte par David Foenkinos (review)

Reviews 197 bande de jeunes défenseurs des animaux n’a deviné la violence de ceux à qui elle s’attaquait. [...] un bateau couvert d’impacts de balles, nous le rappelle”(202). Ferney thus succeeds in demonstrating that the absolute greed of some people is mortgaging the future of our planet. Every carefully-chosen word of her elegant and poetic prose touches the reader so deeply that her impassioned plea for the rule of man not to be the end of the reign of life cannot be ignored. Canisius College (NY) Eileen M. Angelini Foenkinos,David.Charlotte.Paris: Gallimard,2014.ISBN 978-2-07-014568-3.Pp.222. 18,50 a. Although subtitled as a novel, the book is a rather well-researched biography of the German-Jewish artist/painter Charlotte Salomon, born in Berlin in 1917 and murdered in Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1943. The author follows in chronological order and with exact details the via dolorosa of this woman from her early days in the German capital through her life in exile on the Côte d’Azur, where her chef d’œuvre was created, until her last day in one of the infamous gas chambers set up by the Nazi regime in occupied Poland. The classification roman might be justified because certain facts, especially emotional states of the heroine, had to be reconstructed and were left to the sensitivity and historical judgment of the author. Foenkinos, who received the Prix Renaudot for his efforts, also shares the various stages of his research with the contemporary reader by placing the subject of his retrospective into a larger historical and social context. His own examination of facts and locations provides the narrative with critical, as well as artistic legitimation. Still, Foenkinos is not the first writer who followed the traces of the young artist whose posthumous fame is attached to Leben? Oder Theater?—a collection of around 800 gouaches which together with musical compositions was striving for a sort of Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art. Inspired by the life and art of Charlotte Salomon was also Elana Wolff’s poetry collection Mask (Guernica, 2004). Foenkinos—and this is his new unique style—has decided not to make any sentence longer than one line, defying both contemporary prose and poetry. Most of the time, several lines are placed together like paragraphs or strophes, but without rhyme. The recurring structure of these sentences (typesetting: flush left) stresses the importance of each statement and makes it obvious that this text was not intended as common prose. The short one-liners bundled into packages like strophes evoke a certain finality of the message: by declining long-winded explanations, the statement becomes final. Systematically applied, this syntax seems to convey a higher truth. Of course the short syntactic units are easier to read than extended sentence structures. They fulfill a didactic purpose: to pay clear and convincing homage to the unusual artist Charlotte Salomon. In his previous, sometimes humorous works, Foenkinos adhered to a more conventional text organization which did not rely on the length of the printed line. In the case of Charlotte, whose life story moved him personally, as he explained in a video clip distributed by his publisher, he tried to set new creative standards—if not for the genre of contemporary prose, certainly for his own writing. The concept of the poème en prose comes up as a new prose en poème. Ocean County College (NJ), emeritus Gert Niers Haddad, Hubert. Théorie de la vilaine petite fille. Paris: Zulma, 2014. ISBN 978-284304 -673-5. Pp. 398. 20 a. The story of the Fox sisters,the inadvertent originators of the American Spiritualist movement, provides the thread that binds an ambitious novel spanning forty years of American history in the 1800s. Amid the historical and social turmoil of the era, Spiritualism provided reassurance to a society preoccupied with mortality. It lent a voice to women, whose emancipation paralleled that of the slaves. The novel recounts how Kate and Maggie Fox’s antics and ghost stories drew public attention, changing the course of their family’s lives. From their modest upbringing in a rural New York farmhouse, the sisters are...