Les arbres ne montent pas jusqu’au ciel by Marianne Rubinstein (review)

Reviews 269 Rubinstein, Marianne. Les arbres ne montent pas jusqu’au ciel. Paris: Albin Michel, 2012. ISBN 978-2-226-24298-3. Pp. 197. 17 a. Rubinstein’s third novel traces the evolution of its protagonist, a forty-one-yearold economics professor and mother, through the first year of a difficult separation. Presented as diary entries with dates, divided into chapters for each season, Yaël Koppman’s story begins with five sentences, some of them incomplete, written, like most of the novel, in terse, emotionally charged language. She often omits the “je” in the first sentence of her entries, emphasizing the sense of loss and absence of self. It is only in the last entry, just over a year later, that she includes the subject and its helping verb in the passé composé, instead of beginning the sentence with a single anonymous past participle, demonstrating the discovery of a clear and well-defined “I.” The backdrop for this search for self is contemporary Paris. References to places like the Jardin des Plantes, Berthillon ice cream on l’île Saint-Louis, and the Seine near the Institut du Monde Arabe, where impromptu dance groups form in the summers, contribute to the creation of a real and tangible world and resonate of autobiography, since Rubinstein is herself an economics professor at Université Denis Diderot in Paris. In this context, the first-person protagonist navigates contemporary women’s issues such as balancing work and family life, finding contentment in amorous relationships, the dynamics of female friendships, and most importantly surviving a life crisis, which make this novel significant and immediate for any twenty-first century reader. One question resurfaces throughout the novel in conversations among her girlfriends: what does being forty mean to you? The first-person protagonist finds answers in Roland Barthes’s theory of vita nova, where a single event can change one’s life and divide it into two segments of before and after. The author, citing Barthes, states that one must embrace the second half of life, seize it, and devise a new plan of action. For Barthes and all writers, including Yaël Koppman, this also means adopting a new kind of writing, something that she eventually accomplishes by inserting a heretofore absent “je” in the last entry of the novel. Along the path of self-discovery, the narrator looks to various poets and writers including Virginia Woolf (the inspiration for Rubinstein’s previous novel) and Sei Sho -nagon (author of The Pillow Book), whom she quotes and analyzes. The narrator is also inspired by her own profession and sees things from a socioeconomic perspective, something reflected in the title of the book. Like an economic bubble, which at some point has to burst, a tree will not rise inexorably to the heavens. Similarly, personal catastrophes wreak havoc, but at some point dissipate. Although modest and straightforward, this novel, like the proverb from the title, offers insight into managing personal and literary crises, finding solace in their inevitable conclusion, and creating something new from the vestiges. East Carolina University (NC) Marylaura Papalas ...