Ladivine by Marie NDiaye (review)

Reviews 263 reminds him that minutia tend to distract the viewer from the whole of the mosaic. Her counsel leads the reader to see Oleg’s task as that of a wise editor paring down the plethora of details about Catherine and focusing on his story. To complicate matters, the Politburo recently noticed and applauded Oleg’s first film. Oleg is no longer a poor, struggling artist. His current fame leads his former professor to remind Erdmann not to forget history in Catherine’s scenario.For Oleg,the word“history”meant Catherine’s story as that of a German princess becoming a Russian empress, but there is certainly a larger ideological frame to consider especially now that the Politburo is looking over his shoulder. Censorship reigns as the government’s film committee, which still sees Eisenstein’s experimental formalism as problematic,modifies and/or deletes Erdmann’s “realistic”details. The committee also decides that Erdmann will be demoted to artistic assistant to the film’s director, a well-known specialist of the camera. Kozine is the director who brings the camera’s eye to Oleg’s scenario. The filming itself adds yet another dimension, the theatricality of the actors. The czarina saw herself as an enlightened monarch on a world stage on which she invited Diderot to visit in 1774, discussed republican ideals with him, and proposed to publish the Encyclopédie in Russia. The actresses who play Catherine make Oleg aware of her stage presence. She was called Catherine le Grand. Kozine and Erdmann struggle with evoking the hidden masculinity of the czarina. Yet Catherine slips away from their determination to capture her in a movie in 1989, which is also the year when the Berlin Wall falls and Leningrad becomes St. Petersburg again. The republic of Russia appears and promises explosive freedom. Oleg even writes a televised version of Catherine’s erotic, almost pornographic, episodes, which are financially profitable but disappointing for him. His common German ancestry with Catherine keeps him doing research on her, especially about her travels outside Russia. She may have planned on going into northern Italy to Ravenna with Lanskoï, her twenty-something lover when she was fifty. Oleg would like to provide a glimpse of such a Catherine yet unseen in scholarship and movies about her. So he wants to reveal her dreams for that other life she yearned after but could not have. Intently he retraces this journey and finally finds himself through Catherine’s dilemma. Trinity University (TX) Roland A. Champagne NDiaye, Marie. Ladivine. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. ISBN 978-2-07-012669-9. Pp. 416. 21,50 a. Ladivine tells the troubled story of three generations of women—Ladivine Sylla, her daughter Malinka (Clarisse), and her granddaughter Ladivine—who all suffer to varying degrees from the consequences of inauthentic living. Reflecting on the latter two generations, Clarisse’s husband observes:“Ils avaient vécu tous les trois ensemble une existence déformée par quelque chose d’indicible et de considérable, qui avait flotté au-dessus d’eux sans jamais se dévoiler ni disparaître et qui avait fait de leur vie une vie factice” (345). Clarisse, in an effort to distance herself from her origins— specifically her mother to whom she refers as “la servante” and for whom she feels “une honte et une peur atroces” (30)—runs away, changing her name from Malinka to Clarisse, a “perfect” (59) forename that reveals nothing of her true identity. She marries Richard Rivière,takes his name,and,in an effort to be accepted unconditionally, subjugates herself, never stating an opinion. However, after 25 years, Richard can no longer tolerate this “femme impersonnelle, irréprochable et candide” (363) and divorces her. While she does regularly visit her mother, who eventually found her, she refuses to reveal anything about her personal life until she meets Freddy Moliger, an alcoholic loner. Clarisse’s daughter, Ladivine, is also strangely influenced by her origins, although she does not initially realize it. Most of the novel’s second half recounts a vacation she takes with her husband and two children to an unnamed tropical country, which, it is implied, may be her grandmother’s home...