Théorie de la vilaine petite fille par Hubert Haddad (review)

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 taken under the wing of their older sister Leah who creates a spiritualist institute in Rochester. They become a national phenomenon frequenting New York City’s high society and achieve international fame before their descent into anonymity, poverty, and alcoholism. Haddad populates this fairy tale, as he terms it, with a myriad of secondary characters. Many are of authentic literary, political, and historical import, such as Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Others are fictitious iconic representations of religious and ethnic groups from the era, such as William Pill, the romantic Irish refugee turned small-time criminal who exploits the Spiritualist movement for financial gain.Through these characters and the social milieus they frequent, Haddad depicts the friction and occasional violence that resulted from the clash of the many spiritual and religious ideologies of the time. Upper-class cosmopolitanism contrasts with the superstitious volatility of farmers and religious country folk. Utopian societies counter more established ideologies. Native Americans, emancipated slaves, and women face isolation in the face of the powerful American majority. To underscore the oppositions that characterized nineteenth-century America, Haddad uses contrasting literary techniques. First-person diary excerpts and the sisters’ reflections on life and love alternate with narratives of historical events.Poetic depictions of waterscapes and landscapes provide a respite from dramatic scenes of war and confrontation.Unfortunately,within such an ambitious work,the sisters seem relegated to a secondary role.Despite the tragedy of their situation,their characterization remains superficial and underdeveloped. Perhaps this echoes the plight of the actual Fox sisters, who disappeared in the flux of history. Somewhat more problematic is that a number of secondary characters are not only more appealing than the Fox sisters but also 198 FRENCH REVIEW 89.1 Reviews 199 evolve, unlike the sisters who remain stagnant and elusive.Although the novel does not bring much new to its subject matter, Haddad’s style is distinctive. The complexity of his vocabulary and the many folk songs and short poems that pepper the novel add some poetry to sterile historical facts. Like a medium from the Spiritualist movement, Haddad resurrects the past in an altered form. He enacts the process of transmigration discussed by the novel’s characters, reviving human experience through a new substance , that of language. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Nathalie G. Cornelius Izarra, Salomon de. Nous sommes tous morts. Paris: Rivages, 2014. ISBN 978-2-74362817 -0. Pp. 132. 15 a. De Izarra evokes the horror and intrigue of cannibalism as one of the last choices by a whaling crew that has encountered the desperate situation of famine in the face of death. They find themselves trapped in their ice-bound vessel named the Providence. The narrator is Nathaniel Nordnight, first officer on the ship that left the Norwegian port of Haugesung on 12 Sept. 1927. The tale alternates between specific daily entries from the ship’s log and his own recollections of what happened. His captain Eddy Sogarvans reminds us of Melville’s Ahab in religious piety and determination. In a fog so thick as...