Ta femme me trompe par David Di Nota (review)

Hollywood playing character roles.Popular among her even more successful colleagues, whose names (George, Stephen, Matt) make easy guessing for the reader, she is frequently invited to parties. At one such occasion she meets Kouhouesso, an actor from Cameroon who has forged a comparably successful Hollywood career, playing among other roles the cynical black sidekick to a white detective.What follows is a torrid affair whose treatment will invariably draw comparisons with Annie Ernaux’s Passion simple (1991), since the story is narrated entirely from Solange’s perspective, the sexual scenes are vivid, and it is never clear just how such an intelligent and experienced woman could fall so hard for a man at best described as enigmatic: “Elle décommandait ses amies, son coach, son yoga, sa psy, pour être sûre d’être disponible” (91). Yet the comparison with Ernaux’s text proves ultimately misleading, because Darrieussecq’s novel is more subtle. Little is learned about Kouhouesso, but that little is important. Although he is an action film star, he dreams of directing a film based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Eventually he assembles the funding and attracts prominent actors (George is the star). After some hesitation Solange is cast as Kurtz’s naïve fiancée. The film is made, and then the affair with Solange rather abruptly ends. Although the center of the novel would appear to be Solange, it is Kouhouesso who is the intriguing interest. A man of physical and intellectual strength, for the most part decisive, and willing to take risks, he nevertheless appears unable to cope with the love of a white woman.While Solange, for her part, is indifferent to the interracial dimension of their relationship, he gives the impression that he cannot quite cope, not with interracial sex, but interracial love. If Kouhouesso’s skin color never seems important to Solange, her whiteness appears to represent a barrier for him. At this junction, Heart of Darkness becomes important. Why would an African wish to film a story that presents such a negative image of Africa? Is it a reflection of Kouhouesso’s self-loathing, of a seemingly unjustified insecurity? In any case, his motives for rejecting Solange’s love, while never made clear, constitute the most intriguing dimension of the story. The novel’s rather clunky title comes from Duras who opines that if you did not love men, you could not endure them. Let’s hope that is an exaggeration. Florida State University William Cloonan Di Nota, David. Ta femme me trompe. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-0141838 . Pp. 137. 15,90 a. This ironic title is indicative of the entire story: a sexual comedy told in a series of brief, numbered vignettes. The protagonist, a journalist whose affair with a married woman entails a number of strange and sometimes burlesque episodes, writes about his personal and professional adventures in a terse first-person narrative. Di Nota characterizes sexual relationships between men and women as banal and absurd. His ‘theory of love’ reduces feminine sexuality to a figure of speech, the synecdoche, and 258 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 259 masculine sexuality to another figure of speech, the zeugma.Although this simplification denies women and men a legitimate or respectable sexual identity, at least in this instance both sexes are treated equally. This investigation into gendered identity is also evident in the relationships among the main character, the married woman, and her husband because it is sometimes unclear who manipulates whom and what role sex ultimately plays in bringing the people of this story together. These tactics, which only create confusion concerning the identities and relationships of the characters, add to the general sense of absurdity that di Nota develops throughout the novel. Adding to the confusion is the play between fiction and reality, between writing novels and doing journalism, and between telling the truth and dishing out “des histoires bidon” (82). The main protagonist also unabashedly confesses that he lies about the content of interviews he conducts and uses for his work, establishing the fact that he is not a reliable source of information. These moments of metafiction combined with the tenuous division between reality...