Bête de cirque by Tiphaine Samoyault (review)

Samoyault, Tiphaine. Bête de cirque. Paris: Seuil, 2013. ISBN 978-2-02-109826-6. Pp. 154. 16 a. The narrator of this book—let us say “Tiphaine Samoyault” for the sake of simplicity—looks back upon a period in 1995 that she spent teaching in Sarajevo, when that city was under siege. She wonders what prompted her, as a young woman barely out of school, to leave her comfortable life in Paris and to make such as gesture. She is quite sure that it was not altruism, nor any other noble quality of character.Was it a desire to emulate her elders, those people who had had the opportunity to accomplish heroic deeds during heroic times? Was it a will to affirm that not everyone in her own generation had forgotten how to live politically? Had she fallen prey to the idea of history? To that of a utopian European ideal? Bedeviled by those questions and by others equally pernicious, the only thing that seems certain to her is that she feels a profound sense of shame. Because she had wanted to see what war was like for her own purposes, and because those purposes were not pure. Because she had wished to be in the middle of something, and because she had pretended to be someone that she was not. She recognizes that it is not only Sarajevo that makes her ashamed, but also many other experiences, both before and after Sarajevo.As if shame were, for her, a chronic and absolutely constitutional state. It is hardly surprising, then, when she confesses,“je voulais écrire un essai sur la honte” (69); nor is it astonishing when she discovers that the very writing of that essay produces shame in her. After all, a writer is always on the outside, looking in, she reasons, someone who lives vicariously, telling stories about what other people do. “L’écrivain était honteux. C’est ce qui le privait parfois de toute capacité à s’engager” (76).Yet when she does put herself forward, she feels like a trained animal in the circus. In other roles, she does not fare much better. She bemoans the “ratage collectif” (53) of her generation of young intellectuals; she realizes that there is a special sort of shame that afflicts women in first-world, bourgeois society; even her maternity occasions her shame. She often feels as besieged as Sarajevo itself:“Je sais ce que c’est que d’avoir un cœur encerclé”(55). Many readers will recognize that state of siege, and many of them will find something of themselves in the account of herself that Samoyault offers here. Some readers will understand, too, that nobody is ever one thing alone, neither a‘writer,’nor a‘teacher,’nor a‘mother,’ nor indeed a ‘reader,’ but rather several things at once and many things in the course of a lifetime. People are mobile both in time and across time. Thus, when Samoyault returns to Sarajevo fifteen years after her first stay, she finds that the city has changed a great deal—and the same, undoubtedly, could be said of her. University of Colorado Warren Motte 270 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 ...