Moi, j’attends de voir passer un pingouin by Geneviève Brisac (review)

carry within themselves. Yet the novel’s protagonists lack depth, becoming onedimensional due to their fixations. Laura’s crisis does not elicit much sympathy, since the secondary characters are struggling with their own problems. The world of Besson’s novel is on edge, populated by humans who have become vessels of despair due to the emptiness of contemporary society: “tout le monde avait une histoire, et [...] ceux dont l’histoire était la plus intéressante étaient ceux à propos de qui on ne détectait rien à l’œil nu” (170). The strength of the novel is not Besson’s descriptions of his characters. It is his analysis of a society in which people have forgotten how to reach out beyond themselves. Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania Nathalie G. Cornelius BRISAC, GENEVIÈVE. Moi, j’attends de voir passer un pingouin. Paris: Alma, 2012. ISBN 978-2-36279-028-7. Pp. 133. 13,80 a. A glance at this novel’s cover suggests a bunch of cute nounours parading down the street. However, closer examination reveals very unhappy bears marching in a demonstration and holding up signs whose content is not revealed. A similar experience greets readers as they enter into the story. What initially appears to be an anodyne tale of mother and son with differing opinions about having animals in the house quickly slides into a prolonged meditation on cruelty, specifically human beings’ cruelty to animals and ultimately to one another. The narrator and her son, Nelson, are at odds over animals. While he wants a pet of any sort, his mother will only settle for a penguin, presumably because getting one is extremely unlikely, and in any case all she wants to do is watch it walk by. Since Nelson is the junior member in the discussion, he tries to make his case by showing up at home with the animal he wishes to keep. This usually tips the argument in his favor. All this is banal enough and vaguely amusing, but the story slowly darkens. A rabbit has a paw chopped off, a white laboratory rat is forced out the house, a blind cat is left in the Arène de Lutèce where inevitably it is crushed to death by boys playing soccer, and the narrator confides that when she was a little girl she forced a hamster to do what hamsters are not expected to do. The demise or abandonment of animals also has a literary aspect. References are made to the deaths (often peaceful) of Albert Camus’s dog, Taïut, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett’s canine, Flush, and Rosa Luxembourg’s feline, Mimi. Clearly the treatment of animals in this novel has a metaphoric dimension, but one only understood in relation to the way humans treat humans. Céleste is the concierge. Plain-spoken and equipped with common sense, one would think she is a reliable presence in the novel, but the fact that her last name is Schikelgruber , Hitler’s family name, lessens one’s confidence. References to Rosa Luxembourg ’s life invariably recalls her death, murdered by proto-Nazi thugs just after World War I. And the narrator’s memory of her two adolescent friends, one the child of a Le Monde editor, and the other, a scion of Gaston Gallimard, two jeunes filles bien rangées, seems quite rosy until she tells us they attempted to abandon her on an island. A dog saved her. What appears to join together the anecdotes about people and animals is the notion of vulnerability, “cette force [...] qui pousse vers la révolution, vers les gens et vers les bêtes” (74). The narrator suggests that vulnerability is at the basis of our tenderness and our violence, that human beings use these two powerful drives at once to give expression to and to Reviews 987 escape from the burden of self-consciousness, either through love or hate, and that we tend to act out these drives in our relations with animals. The narrator offers two suggestions concerning how to control these dual forces. For the artist, it is the discipline of distance and creation; Gauguin is the example of choice. For the less gifted, it...