Ce qu’il reste des mots par Matthieu Mégevand (review)

into any available quarter of the city and set up camp or occupied empty buildings. In these places, refugees seeking food and shelter were determined to occupy properties abandoned by the former owners seeking safety elsewhere. Chakib exercised tight control over his affairs, building an empire in which none of his sons had an interest as each followed his own pursuits. No one ever outmaneuvered Chakib. One person proved to be his match—Lamia, Hamid’s mother and the wife of the superintendent of his country estate. Her inscrutable ways, obstinate temperament, and fervent attachment to her son’s interests, made her capable of anything. Chakib’s control ran headlong into her wily web. A father, striving to prevent the disintegration of his lifelong labor while searching for an heir, Chakib decides to hold fast against forces ready to encroach on his property, remaining a heroic but lonely figure unyielding to the winds of change. Taking us inside politics, cultural diversity, and family tensions in Beirut during the civil war, Charif Majdalani writes with intensity and passion, employing a neighborhood as symbol for his homeland, Lebanon. Neumann University (PA) Maria G. Traub Mégevand, Matthieu. Ce qu’il reste des mots. Paris: Fayard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-21367799 -6. Pp. 209. 17 a. This is a work of popular theology in the form of a récit: the nameless narrator, a lapsed French Catholic, examines the problem of disease, suffering, and death by focusing on a bus accident in Switzerland that killed twenty-two children. He claims that because there is no rational explanation for the crash, “ne reste que le hasard, l’absurdité, le mal, l’absence de sens” (162). A writer by trade, he devotes weeks to questioning others and to reading philosophy, believing that it is impossible that “les mots ont abdiqué” (27) their job of making sense of events. He studies Wittgenstein, consults a doctor specializing in psychology, reads Quignard and Camus, visits a cardinal at the Vatican, and considers the ancient Stoics. He also re-examines his own near brush with death due to Hodgkin’s lymphoma in his youth, relishes the beauty of his dying friend Hannah’s musical compositions and performances, and reflects on the ability of poetry to create joy. None of this activity gives him answers, though, because he wants to find a guilty party, as if history were a whodunit. His breakthrough comes when he reinterprets the word metanoia in the Greek text of Luke 13:5 not as “repentance” or “conversion” but as “un changement radical de pensée” (128). Although the book does not say so, this reading is used by a number of recent Englishlanguage translations of the New Testament and corresponds to the meaning of metanoia as a rhetorical term in English. In the passage in Luke, then, Jesus would be saying that the correct response to inexplicable loss is to think differently, to consider not its metaphysical causes but our response. The narrator goes on to read contemporary Protestant process theologians and is drawn to their concept of a Jesus whose death did 274 FRENCH REVIEW 88.2 Reviews 275 not redeem the world and a God who “n’a pas voulu, ni même prévu la Croix” (151). In this theology, God is not indifferent to suffering, but he cannot prevent it because he is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He is developing, just like us, and he needs our help. Loss is still loss, but our response should not be to blame God or question fate but to try to improve the world. This is the conclusion toward which the book has been working from the start, a theology which exculpates God and empowers people. Not all readers, however, will find the narrative or the development of the theology compelling enough to reach the end of this book. Mégevand, a journalist for Le Monde des Religions, previously published a collection of short stories and a novel, Les deux aveugles de Jéricho. College of San Mateo (CA) Susan Petit Mérot, Pierre. Toute la noirceur du monde. Paris: Flammarion, 2013. ISBN 978-20813 -1273-9. Pp. 237. 18 a. After a launch...