Partages by Gwenaëlle Aubry (review)

Aubry, Gwenaëlle. Partages. Paris: Mercure de France, 2012. ISBN 978-2-71523307 -2. Pp. 184. 17,50 a. Why has this new novel been nominated for the Prix Goncourt and the Prix du roman de l’Académie Française? Probably because Aubry (author of Personne, winner of the 2009 Prix Femina; FR 84.3), a devoted literary writer and specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, has formed a modest masterpiece of French prose and stylistic experiment that probes a most poignant and controversial conflict of today: hatred and hope in the Middle East, the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The time line: after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the“Twin Towers”and the second Intifada of 2002. The protagonists are two seventeen-year-old girls at the cusp of their maturity. Sarah is an Israeli Jew, raised in NewYork with memories of her Polish Jewish family in the Holocaust, before immigrating to Israel with her divorced mother; while Leila is a Palestinian raised in a refugee camp and constrained by her culture to social and political passivity—until the end.Rather than rehearse the vexed polemic of“moral equivalence,” Aubry develops historical, existential, and stylistic parallels. Separate narratives express the thoughts and actions of each young woman, giving way to alternating pages at the end, confirming the ironic polysemy of partages (both sharing and dividing). Aubry juxtaposes the opposing mythologies of the Jewish state: the 1948 “War of Liberation” versus the Arab “Nakba” (catastrophe) and two versions of the Balfour Declaration taught in Palestinian or Israeli schools. Both girls have absorbed these histories by proxy, by the direct experience of the Israeli occupation. As Israelis and Palestinians they ironically share a common political imaginary. They also share a taste for literature, Sarah for the lush biblical novel of Thomas Mann, Joseph and His Brothers, and Leila, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. And she is also haunted by the portrait of T.S. Eliot accompanying“The Waste Land.”Oppressing them both is the Occupation, demoralizing for both peoples, another ironic partage. While evoking the incendiary ideological conflict, both between and within Israelis and Palestinians, the writing is invariably elegant, sensorially and topographically accurate,as we follow the girls,their communities and families in the cities of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, and in the Palestinian refugee camp; the girls are especially marked by the Israeli checkpoints, discouraging for both sides. Aubry is particularly adept at reflecting the circumstances of these parallel lives through the colloquial idiom of each person, with an amazing mastery of verbal markers of each culture, English, Hebrew, and Arabic. Aubry treats the excruciating impasse with an objective stance free of ideology but not bereft of compassion. The beauty of her writing provides a refuge from despair, even hope. Brandeis University (MA) Edward K. Kaplan 260 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 ...