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authorities to do research on the life and political career of the victim. At the end, though, he characteristically shreds his manuscript. The story consists of his research activities in pursuit of information about his subject. Frequent flashbacks about his dysfunctional family, including mother, stepmother, and gay father are included. We meet all the eccentric people he encounters in the course of his investigations. The narrative is often hard to follow because the hero keeps going off on tangents about the different people he meets in the present or has known in the past. The story sometimes borders on incoherence. Durand seeks to emulate the verbal ebullience of Rabelais. Through word association we are treated to long lists of words that make one lose the thread of the story line.There is also a tendency to write page-long sentences with dependent clauses and interruptions in an attempt to create a kind of neoProustian stream of consciousness.Again the reader finds it difficult to make out what is happening. As for the man whose life he is studying, Carlo Calvi, we learn of a very sordid dimension of twentieth-century French politics. Calvi was a communist who worked as a collaborator with the Nazis both before and after Stalin’s break with Hitler. He even followed the retreating Germans to work for them in their homeland. Later he engaged in every sort of dishonesty and treachery to advance his political career. He even worked as an informer for the French authorities during the Algerian War. Durand gives the impression that Calvi’s hypocritical and mercenary tactics were typical of the politicians of his generation. Many others seemed ready to sell out for their own selfish benefit. Former antagonists became political bedfellows when they had something to gain from it. Other negative aspects of contemporary France, like racism against Jews and Muslims and mistreatment of the elderly are incorporated. This work conveys a highly pessimistic view of human life in general. People emerge from the cinema blinded by the ugliness of the real world. Everything is a lie. Instead of living their own lives, individuals exist vicariously through fiction. They see everything through a screen of words and images projected by others. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Duroy, Lionel. Vertiges. Paris: Julliard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-260-021148. Pp. 468. 21 a. Duroy, co-biographer for the rich and famous, has a second reputation for thinly disguising his own life in fictions that dredge up and replay a dismal past; Vertiges is of the latter genre. The dustcover’s assessment that the author “tente de démêler l’imbroglio d’informations, de sensations, d’émotions qui tissent l’histoire d’une vie” is partly true but mostly generous. The story does indeed have a knotted, even muddled quality that Augustin, the narrator-writer, only exacerbates in his attempts at self-understanding. The one plot point that becomes abundantly clear is that his parents’ grotesque relationship has severely handicapped Augustin psychically and emotionally. His mother, a fallen grande bourgeoise saddled with eleven children, 264 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 265 transforms from fishwife to madwoman. His father, a vacuum cleaner salesman with no business sense but utter submission to his disenchanted virago, is incapable of rectifying the ongoing family disaster. Augustin sees reflections of this primordial couple’s dysfunction in all his own ill-fated relationships, but particularly in his twenty-year marriage with Esther, who raises his children from a first marriage and from their own, and who unfailingly and uncomplainingly offers him moral support and room to write. (Go figure.) This summary, however, suggests a narrative more simply plotted than is the case for Vertiges. First, there is the imbrication of Augustin’s writing of his autobiographies with his life, which promises an interesting interaction of writing and reality. Instead, it results in a confusingly out-of-synch narration further aggravated by Augustin’s claims that one event or another was the origin of some dramatic demise, an occurrence soon to be blurred through obsessive repetition. Second, the novel suffers from a failure of judicious editing. It is unevenly paced with long periods of writer’s (and lover...

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