La ruche par Arthur Loustalot (review)

Reviews 273 tale offers intriguing and stimulating lessons on the multiple savors of a life richly lived in the shadows of death.As she herself comes to see even more broadly across and through originary confines, the voyante Yolande may ultimately model for us the gift of awareness, of sight onto that which is both beyond and within us. Union College (NY) Charles R. Batson Loustalot, Arthur. La ruche. Paris: Lattès, 2013. ISBN 978-2-7096-4474-7. Pp. 186. 16 a. The novel genre is an accommodating crucible to explore “what if”: in this case, what if the children of a broken family could help their parents in transition. Alice and her three teenaged daughters all experience the violence of a troubled husband and father. The daughters try to console their mother whose husband left their household two years ago as the story begins. The back story traces the emotional journey of the broken family. The young women have brought their mother back from an attempted suicide and now continuously try to give her hope and the will to live. The daughters were witnesses to the father’s violence toward their mother. Her mania for keeping a neat home used to bear witness to her devotion to housework while her daughters sought alternatives for this housebound feminine identity. Marion the oldest tried to get her father to leave home because she knew he had a mistress and a history of violence toward her mother. The youngest sister Claire intervenes and denies him the thrill of being violent toward his daughters. Meanwhile the third sister Louise is their mother’s favorite and, as a consequence, has sworn off men in her life. The camaraderie among the sisters builds up in their common enmity against their father and sympathy toward their mother thus energizing them to stay at home and help Alice find a new life. Meanwhile Alice descends into mad moments that lead her daughters to consider placing her in a sanatorium for their mutual protection. The opening and closing, locking and unlocking doors in their household recreate a kind of labyrinth about the compartmentalizing of their problems due to the overbearing father and their mutual influences on each other. Louise, for example, locks away a letter the husband sends announcing his desire for a divorce. Slowly she unlocks the drawer and shares the contents of the letter with her sisters. They decide that the mother is not sane enough to see the letter so it is re-locked in Louise’s drawer. As all four get accustomed to his absence, the home becomes a kind of pressure-cooker. Alice has done damage to all the daughters in their self-confidence. There are degrees in which each one of the four can begin opening or closing different doors for privacy, security, or simply solitude. As the passage of time moves all four women farther away from the event of the family man’s departure, the four women remember this event differently. The daughters speak of their heroism in encouraging the father to leave. The mother is distraught at not having her man around to repair things. Smoking seems to be a habit all four women share in their common anxiety about the situation and their need for finding ways to accommodate the stress in their lives. Loustalot’s style evokes the emotional trauma of the situation with repetition marking their lives and their forgetfulness of what was the beginning, middle, and end of their self-destruction as a family unit. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne Maurer, Sophie. Les indécidables. Paris: Seuil, 2013. ISBN 978-2-02-109816-7. Pp. 139. 16 a. Un homme nommé Ariel disparaît,laissant derrière lui sa femme et un enfant,mais pas un mot d’explication. Sasha, son amie d’enfance, que rien ne retient en Europe, décide de partir à sa recherche. Parmi les lieux les plus plausibles de sa fuite, elle choisit les États-Unis, et s’envole pour New-York avant d’aller, sur les conseils de la sculptrice Flora, à Detroit. Là, elle fait la connaissance d’Éric, un chauffeur routier dévoreur de livres et de...