Le silence des femmes par Thérèse Lamartine (review)

guerre civile et la ruine, malgré toutes les richesses en gaz, en pétrole et en ressources naturelles et humaines dont le pays dispose. Rappelant par moment Rachid Mimouni et Boualem Sansal, Khadra a fait avec une écriture superbe la radioscopie du cancer qui empoisonne l’Algérie. Université du Wisconsin, Stevens Point Alek Baylee Toumi Lamartine, Thérèse. Le silence des femmes. Québec: Triptyque, 2014. ISBN 978-289031 -920-2. Pp. 311. $25 Can. As the new millennium begins, Dr. Brian Sauvé, psychiatrist, attends a New Year’s Eve celebration with other therapists in New York. The party turns to horror when Brian discovers the dying body of a mutilated woman in the bathroom. The killer is his mentor, Dr. Martin Lucas. Will Atom Smith, detective, be able to keep Brian, his lover Maelle who has flown to his side from Paris, and his daughter Christal safe from harm? Who will protect them all, especially after a second body is discovered, that of Christal’s best friend Britney? With the crimes accomplished, the confession declared, and the criminal behind bars within the first seventy pages, where will the novel go from here? Brian attempts to pick up the pieces of his life. In doing so, he is thrown into the maelstrom of “le plus grand féminicide contemporain [...]. De la chair humaine livrée aux pires lubies. Du gibier à chasser, à violer, à fracasser, et à jeter”(95– 96). He plunges into the depths of despair as his own abuse as a child resurfaces. He must understand, not just for himself, not simply for his lover, but for his daughter and womankind as a whole. He must unearth, expose, and destroy the secret of the “machiste fondamentaliste” (127). Brian tries to comprehend why one attacks and kills women as a result of being, as a young person, exploited by a man or men. Does it have something to do with the complicit silence of the women who do not stop the aggression of the men who are committing it? As he ages and travels, he witnesses women’s violence against women, lives through his friend’s 9/11 experiences, and senses the birth of a conspiracy to wipe out all women in the world. Can Brian in his new capacity as representative for the UN Commission on Women, convince men to back off and change? “Les hommes haïssent les femmes pour ce qu’elles sont. Les femmes haïssent les hommes pour ce qu’ils font” (213). Do these two sentences summarize (wo)man’s condition in the world today? Lamartine takes her subject so widely that she loses credibility. Why, from the crime of the beginning of the novel, does she think she can eradicate mankind in a nameless time, creating a bizarre new world without appropriate preparation for it? Her horrific ending leaves a bitter taste. She has the potential for several interesting novels, but she takes on too much. She may be the director of Women’s Affairs in Canada, but her bleak worldview is an instant turnoff to this female reader. I fear I shall be haunted by her imagery for a while to 258 FRENCH REVIEW 88.3 Reviews 259 come. In addition, there are places in her novel far below the reading level of the layman . The author should rewrite and attempt at least two if not three separate works from this one. Alliance Française de Santa Rosa (CA) Davida Brautman Laroque, Didier. La mort de Laclos. Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 2014. ISBN 978-2-87673931 -4. Pp. 159. 15 a. By the early 1800s the intellectual and often libertine values of the Enlightenment were well on their way to being superseded by Romanticism’s exaltation of emotion, nature, and love. Choderlos de Laclos’s Liaisons dangereuses (1782) somewhat belatedly epitomizes the former, while Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), though published earlier, represents the latter and, in fact, was a major factor (along with Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther) in creating the Romantic movement. Laroque’s very late entry into this field alludes to both of these French epistolary novels. Rousseau’s Saint-Preux and his...